If All Angels Are Terrible
by raining-down-hearts
Summary: [Resbang SE fandom 2014 entry!] Maka Albarn is a spaceship captain, and she scrapes out a living by means both legal and not- but when Imperium, the military government that rules the entire solar system, begins to cause more trouble than usual, she knows the only thing to do is fight despite overwhelming odds. [!Major char death.]
1. Prologue

"Kami. Whoa. Kami, uh, come look at this." Spirit looked deeply uneasy, but then he was usually worrying about something or other; the man was at least half mother hen. Kami grunted and dragged herself over, annoyed at having her landing procedures interrupted. This moon was small and marked as uninhabited, despite the unusually nice-looking atmosphere curling around it like intricate white lace, but it was a convenient resting point while they tended to their cargo and did some maintenance. More importantly, it wasn't a place where any Imperium troops would come sniffing around- still, she didn't want to hang around too long. It was just asking for trouble.

"What?"

"Look." He jabbed with one shaking finger at the external camera's display screen.

Kami did an actual double take and a chill like the darkest depths of space gripped her spine. "Is that _moss_?" she hissed, nearly plastering her nose to the screen.

"Uh, well, you're the biologist, not me, but it's fuzzy and green and it's not supposed to be here," Spirit muttered, tugging on his collar. "And also, now that I'm paying attention, the atmo readings are not… they're not what we'd expect. This is a _colony_, Kami, it's got to be."

"Shit," she said blankly, mind racing. "How the hell did a colony ever get established without getting registered? Who terraformed it?" More importantly, and more ominously, where were the space stations that orbited every colony?

She got no further, because, with his usual impeccably eerie timing, their captain strode in, steps timed to whip his long black cloak about dramatically. "What's the hold up?" he said, not ungently. "I'd like to get our cargo cared for and get _Razor's Edge _back on the road in a day at most."

"Er-" said Kami, very eloquently.

"You see," Spirit said, marginally less shocked. "There's, uh, plant life. And an atmosphere that could almost support human life." He peered at the sensor readout display again, flicking overgrown red hair from his eyes- that was always the strangest part about waking up from coldsleep, the way hair grew while a person was out, even as the rest of the body stayed unchanged- and frowned. "Almost, anyway. I mean, it's breathable, but long term it'd be problematic. If I had to bet I'd say someone started to make this a colony and then failed."

Captain Death brushed nonexistent lint meticulously from his dark cloak and then strolled up to the external camera, edging Kami aside. "Green," he said softly, wolfish eyes widening in a way that was not reassuring at all. "It's so green. What a lovely surprise."

"Lycophytes," Kami said brusquely. "Club mosses. The very first tool in a terraformer's box of tricks. Spirit's right- there are _people _here."

Death began to pan the camera, slowly, humming under his breath all the while; Kami and Spirit exchanged nervous glances while they waited. "I think," he mused at last, voice rich with sorrow, "That there _were _people on this planet." He stepped smoothly aside, and there on the screen was a bulbous, yellow curve, pushed up like a fat mushroom among the thin greenery. It took Kami a long moment to recognize it as a human cranium.

"Fuck," she said, lacking anything else to say. It didn't make her feel better.

Spirit was even whiter than usual, but composed. A bright light was burning in his pale eyes as he began to pace, throwing sharp glances at the screen, and Kami knew exactly why; that skull was child-sized. "Should we send out a signal? In case there are other outposts on the rest of the surface?"

Death nodded. "It's a small moon- but yes, go ahead."

"On it." Spirit disappeared towards the radio room.

"Sir," Kami said, swallowing. "I'd like to-"

"Go take samples?" he said, smiling. "Yes, I thought so. Go on, then, but I still want to leave in a day, and we've got to water our own little green things." For a brief moment, unusual ferocity turned him cold and strange. "We were not circumspect enough at our last stop, and I'm afraid the Imperium might be after us. Make it quick."

"Yes, sir," said Kami, and she was wriggling into her hazard suit not five minutes later.

Stein materialized in the door. "Going somewhere?" he said, grinning.

She scowled at him. "Yes, actually, I'm going collecting." He blinked at her and raised a brow, which put the two pairs of safety goggles he'd forgotten about on his head dangerously askew. "There's bones," she added temptingly. "And _moss_."

"Ooh," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Failed colonies! There's always good data there. I'll get the others and be back in a jiffy." With that he vanished, ignoring her protesting yelp.

In the end, the whole crew but their captain stepped softly onto the rough soil of the little moon, the watery rush of their surface suits' air filters the only sound in their ears as they stared. "Whoever 'formed this place did a damn good job," Kami said into her radio, kneeling to gently pluck a sprig of moss with tweezers and place it into a vial.

"It's pretty," Marie said consideringly, looking around at the low swelling hills, and when Spirit pushed off his helmet, she was the first to follow.

"You two are careless," Stein said, shaking his head, even as he followed their lead, taking a deep testing breath of the thin, rather metallic air. "It'll get you killed."

"Oh, come on," Spirit said, grinning at all of them. "I double-checked the ship's readouts. We can breathe just fine for a bit. None of us plan on getting old anyway-"

"We're not here to stand around," Kami cut in sharply. "We're here to collect specimens, check those bones, and get the hell out before we've got soldiers throwing us into the vacuum, got it?"

Spirit's grin grew. "You're lovely when you boss us around."

She shook her head, watching Marie try and fail to stifle a laugh. "You're fifty-nine years old, Spirit Albarn, shouldn't you have matured by now?"

"I've been in coldsleep for thirty-five of those years, thank you," he said indignantly, scratching the crotch of his surface suit. Kami sighed.

Sid, who was wandering around on the edge of their group, froze, then coughed nervously and pointed. "I see bones. If anyone's interested."

"Ooh!" Kami deftly tripped Stein as he lunged and descended herself, tweezers shining ominously in one hand, the other adjusting the magnifying monocle clamped over one eye. "It's that skull," she said a moment later, prying it from the loose, rocky dirt with carelessness she'd never have used if there weren't five other bits of bone clearly visible not twenty feet away. In fact there were so many, now she was looking, that she had no fear of running out of samples. This place was like a battlefield, a slaughterhouse- or a dying ground. She was sweating and irrationally glad she'd kept her helmet closed. Had the others noticed? She blew out a breath, swallowed, and said, "Human. Er- wait. Shit. Maybe?"

"What do you mean, _maybe?_" Marie questioned, squinting suspiciously into the green-tinted yonder.

"I mean the teeth are _strange_. And the mandibular shape- oh, and the auditory meatus- _sunspots_!" Kami poked and prodded for a moment longer, then said with burgeoning wonder, "Human, but heavily evolved."

"That doesn't make sense," Sid said roughly, though his fear was still there beneath his scowl.

"Science usually doesn't," she mumbled, getting to her feet, the tiny skull cradled very carefully in both hands. "Let's keep looking. I'd wager there are ruins around here not far- this skull isn't more than a century old."

They found the stone toy first, a little long-necked, bat-like thing half buried in the dirt, traces of bright color still apparent on the spread wings. Marie, having grown up in the Imperium orphanages and thus with no exposure to Old Earth lifeforms, pulled it from the ground and said, "A ship?"

"More like a bird," Spirit said. "This is beautiful. Kami, look at this. It's like- it's like what you'd find in the museum."

She took it, looked it over, ran a thickly gloved finger over the tiny crystals studding the wings and the impossibly fine molding of the head. "This is Gliesean make," she said thickly, and the whole crew stiffened.

"Can't be," Spirit said faintly. "Imperium would never let them this deep in the system."

"Who says they _let _them?" Stein put in, taking the toy and tucking it gently into a specimen bag and then deep into his suit.

Marie, foraging further afield, gave a shout then, and they all hurried to join her. She pointed silently over the edge of the rise she stood on, and they stared for a long time, struck dumb by the incongruity of the sight before them.

It was obviously some kind of ship, but it was old, the metal rusted and coated with opportunistic green moss. Feathery things like _ferns_ sheltered in its shadow, which nearly sent Kami into a full-blown fit with Stein not far behind her. Skidding carefully down the ridge, the low stone buildings came clearer, all of them cleverly built with clean square-cut blocks, but slowly wearing away under the burning winds and deep blue sky. There were red stone sculptures on every corner of them, strange carved things that looked like nothing, until the wind picked up and rushed past them, and a low droning hum rose that shook Kami's bones.

"Hello," Spirit shouted suddenly, hands cupped around his mouth, oblivious to the thigh bone that he only just missed with one careless foot. "Hello! Anyone!"

Stein and Kami, more practical, looked at each other with fear so strong it was nearly crippling. "The ship," she whispered at last, drawing him a little away from the others as they scattered among the ramshackle buildings.

"Not ours," he murmured. "Gliesean."

"But those bones were _human,_" she burst out wildly.

He looked at her directly, levelly, as if she were a child. "You've read Old Earth works. They looked up at the stars and then beyond a millenium before they ever even reached out to touch them. What on earth makes you think the a race as advanced as the Glieseans didn't pay the big blue marble a visit at some point, hmm?" Then he laughed rather bitterly, murky eyes wide and wet. "It's not as if we'd _know _if they had ever dropped by Old Earth to pick up some… primitive human specimens, but we do know they had space travel long before we did."

"That's insane," Kami said numbly, from nothing more than habit; Stein's ideas usually were- at first glance, anyway.

"Is it?" Stein prodded.

She sighed. "Well, yes, but your most insane suggestions have an irritating way of being correct. Come on, let's catch up." She was still cradling the little skull as she walked, and Stein seemed far too fascinated with the tiny, perfect, pinprick teeth of the thing for her liking.

Shouts in the distance sped their feet, the tiny mosses sweet-smelling as they crushed them, and Marie greeted them at the entrance to the crashed Gliesean ship with her gun unholstered, white-faced and shaking. "There are boys in there," she said without preamble. "In something like coldsleep."

"There are- someone's _alive_?" Kami shrieked, and she'd darted inside before Marie could say anything else, heart pounding vicious overtime.

She followed the voices and the disturbances in the thick dust, old metal creaking beneath her feet, and skidded into the strangely shaped room where the rest of the crew waited. Spirit, his own gun in his hand, took the little skull and then pointed silently to the two glowing tables; when she approached, gritting her teeth to keep from gasping air, she felt a familiar chill just like that of a human cryogenic coldsleep bed, though these were constructed very differently.

There was a teenage boy on the first table, and a young boy on the second; if they'd been strictly human, she'd have placed them at about fourteen and eight, respectively.

They were _not_ strictly human, however. They were terribly strange within the paper-thin polished quartz that arched protectively over them, golden-skinned, long translucent hair falling over their shoulders, with strong narrow noses. They were rather small for their ages- _again, _she reminded herself fiercely, _if they were human_- and altogether almost astonishingly beautiful, very long lashes lying like frost over flat cheekbones.

They were different, but they reminded her achingly of Maka in their precious sleep, and she had to shake herself before she could join Stein in examining the tables.

"Nothin' like I've ever seen," was his final judgement. "Judging from the technology outside, though, the animal motifs on those buildings, I'd say this ship picked up a few curiosities from Old Earth, not long after we figured out the wheel, and when it crashed for whatever reason, the humans got lucky and lived… for a while."

"Divergent evolution," Kami breathed.

"Yes."

"But they're… human?" Sid asked, moving over to look at the sleeping boys again, his dark skin glinting sickly blue in the light from the tables. When he bent down to blow dust off the quartz screens, the light only got worse.

Kami considered, taking another look at the boys, at their big hands and strangely pale hair, their large, slightly uneven ears- "Yes," she said gingerly, aware all of a sudden that she was sweating, and taking another look at the predatory teeth of the skull Spirit was holding. "In the same way a ratdog's the same species as a housewolf."

"Well, can you turn the sleep beds off?" Spirit said eagerly; everyone turned on him at once, aghast.

"You want us to _wake up _aliens?" Marie said tentatively, eyeing him worriedly, despite the fact that she really ought to be well used to his infamous impulsiveness by now. She was twirling a lock of golden hair around her finger in obvious agitation "Aliens that have clear Gliesean connections and _have never been documented_?"

Spirit waved a hand, hovering over the tables in a protective sort of way. "They're _kids_," he said repressively. "And isn't it obvious they're alone? Don't tell me you didn't notice the blood on the walls coming in here. And, oh yeah, the _bones. _Whoever put these boys here isn't coming back." There was a long, uncomfortable silence at that.

"They might be dead anyway," Kami said at last. "Can't hurt to try and wake them up."

"We might kill them if we do it wrong," Stein pointed out, even as he flexed his hands joyously over the children as if they were on dissection tables instead of alien technology.

"Or they'll kill us," Kami said. "Who knows what viruses they're carrying?"

"Oh." Spirit wilted. "But we're all vaccinated. And they're from Old Earth, after all, and I mean- what's a few thousand years?"

"In virus time? Easily enough to kill us," Stein told him grimly. "But I can scan their blood, if you give me fifteen minutes, and then we'll know for certain."

Kami considered, wiping palms that she'd only just noticed were sweating on her suit. "Even _our _sleep beds take a good three or four hours to fully wake up from, just from basic human biology. If you all want to risk it, I'm in."

"Unplug 'em, then," Spirit said immediately, grinning. Kami sighed and started hunting around, trying to figure out how the hell to turn off the Gliesean tech, while Stein, who was rather mad-eyed in the face of all these exciting, gory new discoveries, booted up his suit's portable scanner.

Sid was the one who figured it out, in the end. He took a step back, knocked his head on a hanging beam, gurgled, and managed to smack the corner of the older boy's table while trying not to fall. The quartz immediately slid away, with a puff of dust and icy air and a soft whirring sound, and the boy's long index finger twitched.

"Scan him! Scan him!" everyone yelped, crowding by the low, round exit opening; Stein spared them all an unimpressed glance and did so, deftly taking a quick syringeful of blood from a vein that thankfully seemed to be adequately human.

Fourteen minutes later, when the boy's eyes were rolling beneath his lids and his whole body shaking, Stein pronounced, "Safe. Nothing our vaccines can't handle. Guess the Imperium did something right."

"I'll bake them a cake," Spirit said dryly.

"Back up," Kami snapped at both of them, shoving them out of her way as she bent over the boy, who let out a low, rumbling groan. "And wake up the other one."

"How-?"

"Do what Sid did!" After some mishaps, they managed it, and the younger boy's quartz slid away too.

Kami didn't see that. She was bent over the older boy, taking his pulse- despite having no idea what would be healthy- and gently pushing his overgrown hair back from his angular face. Giving in to a moment of purely scientific curiosity, she lifted up his lip with one thumb; his teeth were bright, every one of them sharply pointed, and the canines even a little longer than her own, like the skulls of the extinct cats she'd seen in her studies. She lifted one eyelid, intending to check his color and response, and only tight self control built through a lifetime composed entirely of crises and danger kept her from shouting at the bright red that stared back at her.

"He looks healthy enough," she said hoarsely, letting his lid fall shut and stepping back, beginning to unhook the support systems wound around his limbs- at least she _assumed_ that's what they were. "Unhook the other one."

They managed it without killing either boy, miraculously, and then they ran back to the _Razor's Edge _like all the Imperium soldiers in the solar system were on their heels. "They're malnourished," Spirit panted, holding the older boy in his arms.

"Or they're naturally smaller," Kami pointed out.

"Whatever. We're gonna have to feed the poor things up," he said. She regarded him with the near-pity, almost-love she always felt when he said things like that, so naive, so trusting and helpful and _good_. For a man whose grandfather had lived through the great Sky Wars, he really shouldn't be so optimistic.

Their captain reacted much as everyone had expected. "_Aliens," _ he bellowed, cloak flapping as he strode up and down in the medical bay, watching ferociously as Spirit and Stein laid the boys, now stirring visibly and probably only hours from full consciousness, down on cots. "You brought _aliens_ onto my ship? When we're already running from soldiers- do any of you happen to have _any_ understanding of the basic term 'self preservation'?"

"They're just little boys, and we think they're sort of human, so, you know, not really aliens," Spirit pointed out, very scientifically, and then Stein launched into his 'Old Earth abduction' theory, and then the oldest boy rolled over and cried out with a keening noise like a storm wind before falling back into uneasy sleep; the hair rose on Kami's arms at the sound of it.

"They shouldn't be waking up like this, not so… hurting so much," Marie said uneasily, wringing her hands, suit only half-shed and hanging around her hips.

"Well, we could've fucked up the unhooking process," Sid said. "We don't know the first thing about Gliesean technology."

Captain Death paused, bright hazel eyes shining with the unnatural keenness he'd bought under the knife of a surgeon lacking both Imperium funding and morals. "Well. They are young, aren't they? They can't exactly harm us. We need to work on getting ready to leave; if anyone unpleasant shows up we'll just stow them in one of the hidden compartments." The younger boy whimpered and curled in on himself, crying musically; Death put a hand on his sweat-damp forehead almost automatically, just as he often did to Maka.

Kami, thinking of her little daughter, was silently glad that they'd left her in coldsleep during this stop. There was no need for the galaxy to age around her while she slept her life away in the long emptiness between planets, as it had for her parents, and yet there was no need for her to be exposed to these dangerous boys.

"Let's get ready to go, already," she said brusquely. "Time's wasting. Sid, Marie, stay here and watch the boys. Stein, you too. Spirit and the captain and I can do the prep work and check the systems."

She did her work anxiously, quicker than was possibly wise, mind caught between her daughter and the two almost-humans writhing in the bowels of the ship, caught in the throes of sleep sick like she'd never seen before. Nonetheless, it got done, and within eight hours they'd done all the necessary maintenance and were lifting cleanly out of the atmosphere, blasters roaring.

It was then that Spirit, watching the scanners, said quietly, "Captain. A ship."

The ship, an economical little cruiser, was the tell-tale shining blue of Imperium, and it docked forcibly, grappling onto them without asking while they drifted carefully into fuel-saving orbit; the crew, all choice gone, waited silently in the hold beside their Captain, hands hovering over their guns, listening with bated breath to the hiss of the passage airlocks engaging.

As expected, it was Imperium soldiers who marched aboard, heavy boots thunderous on the metal catwalks of the _Razor's Edge_. As expected, their commander began haranguing Death, and the absence of any visible illegal cargo didn't calm things at all.

They all saw it coming, slowly, edgily, like the first dawn on a new planet. The Imperium commander was having _fun,_ was mocking them, and Kami was the first to break.

She stepped out of line, desperately afraid, and screamed, "Why don't you stop fucking around and tell us what you're really here for, you Imp scum?"

The commander considered that, then said, very calmly, "Good point, we're wasting time. Your ship has been confirmed as providing illegal terraforming services for excommunicated colonies. Among other things, including smuggling, but that's what we're putting on the paperwork."

Spirit joined Kami at that. "You bastards!" he hissed, hand fully and obviously on his gun now. "So we helped some colonists who needed it, so what! You're the ones who dumped them on planets that weren't prepped yet, without any of the things they need to establish properly! All because you only see _money_!"

"Still illegal," said the commander, and then, turning lazily and heading back to his own ship, "Shoot them all."

Kami, with the trademark uncanny speed that had kept her alive so long, got him between the shoulderblades, and she took down four more soldiers before she fell. Spirit managed to outdo her, for possibly the first time, and blasted seven. The rest of the _Razor's Edge_ crew acquitted themselves admirably, and Death was a demon, earning his nickname all over again- but they were far outnumbered, and they all lay silent in the end on the blast-heated steel of their ship's hold, just as the Imperium had intended.

Before she died Kami did manage to blast the single door leading to the living quarters of the ship, where the children slept, and she melted it shut so well with that one shot that the surviving Imperium soldiers didn't bother to pry it open. They retreated, and the shining blue government ship detached from the battered _Razor's Edge, _disappearing into the blackness. It left behind the old warhorse to orbit forever in silence above the mossy little moon where so many strange people had died.

Many hours later, deep in the darkness of the ship, a red eye opened.


	2. Chapter One

warning: major character death ahead at some point.

* * *

><p>"That's <em>ridiculous,<em>" Maka hissed, planting her fists on her hips in a way that was a clear danger sign. "Aside from being a wild overcharge- and you'd better believe I know market rates!- that's not what you quoted me to start!"

The scruffy mechanic currently covered head-to-toe in oil from the bowels of the _Razor's Edge_ only shrugged, obviously very used to dealing with temperamental ship captains. "Look, lady, you ain't goin' anywhere safe unless you let me fix that life support system proper, and it's gonna cost you for parts. There's no way around it."

Maka's nostrils flared. Soul winced and grabbed her by the elbow, steering her forcibly away from the mechanic before anything violent could actually occur. She went, but she shot an incredibly nasty glare over her shoulder too; Soul swore he could hear it sizzling the air.

"Look, Maka, she's right," he said once he'd gotten her out of the danger zone, jerking a thumb back at the mechanic, who flashed him the fakest smile he'd seen in a while- but then, even on bustling Junction City, and even for talented mechanics who'd actually managed to get officially certified to work on government property, it was brutally hard to earn a living. "It sucks but this isn't something we can have Black Star patch up with some tape and a prayer. I like my oxygen, you know?"

She grunted stubbornly and said nothing for a while, scuffing her boots through the scorched dirt of the docks, then, reluctantly, "I guess we can sell off a little of that last load we picked up, make up the difference."

Soul clutched at his chest and staggered around; a crewmember from the ship parked next door, lazily lounging in the weak sunshine, probably under the premise of 'guarding the cargo', regarded him suspiciously. "Maka Albarn, voluntarily _selling _cargo? Is the sun imploding? Are there little green men declaring war on us?"

She crinkled her eyes at him and smacked him on the shoulder. "Dramatic. That's a bad habit, you know."

"Why, because it makes you smile and smiling ruins your scary smuggler image?" he teased, tagging after her as she headed back to the mechanic, who raised a dirt-smudged brow at them.

"We're not smugglers," Maka said hastily, stepping on his foot; the mechanic only shrugged, quite obviously not giving a shit if they were legal or not.

"So? Gonna pay me or try your luck breathin' vacuum?"

"We'll pay you," Maka grumbled, slumping visibly at the thought of having to spend money they didn't really have. Such was the cost of doing so much work for free, though, and she knew it. "Come back in a few hours. I need to make a few sales."

"All right. I'll fetch the parts." They shook hands and the mechanic wandered off away from the docks, into the chaotic shining depths of Junction City, her shabby canvas bag of tools slung over her shoulder and clanking loudly.

Maka watched her go rather despairingly, leaning against the side of her ship like it could save her; she always touched it the same way, carefully and lovingly. "Those plants were important," she told Soul, grinding the heel of her boot vengefully into the ground. "The best oxygen producers I've ever seen, they'd be _so _helpful for the people in the colonies…"

He slung an arm around her shoulder and pecked her on the forehead. "Sorry. We need that system fixed. Like I said, I enjoy breathing. In fact I enjoy it so much I'm doing it right now!"

"That doesn't make me feel any better," she snarled, unamused and trying very hard to wriggle around and pinch him.

"Was it meant to?" he pondered, holding her in place. "Breathing is sort of a universal hobby, you know- oof!"

"Serves you right," she sniffed, but her lips were twitching. "Now! Let's go peddle!"

He regarded her grimly. "By which you mean _me._"

"That's the fun of being captain," she beamed, though she did pat his arm apologetically. She wouldn't have asked him to go if she'd had any other options, he knew. "I've got work to do here, anyway. Don't sell more than two cartons, though, and take the genetic specs with you. Try, hmm, try the open market first. We wanna move them fast."

Soul sighed gustily and gave an irritated hum. She did have a hundred chores waiting and then some, and knowing her she'd already made a to-do list at least a foot long, but still, he _really _hated selling things at market. Shouting at passerby made him feel nothing but obnoxious, and the cursed place hurt his ears; anyway, he always got a few choice judgemental stares from people assuming his teeth and eyes and skin were the signs of a bodymod addict. "I have the best captain, I have the best captain, remember that," he muttered under his breath, then he cocked his head and wriggled his ears slightly. "Black Star's sitting down on the job," he told Maka darkly before slinking off into the cargo hold. Her outraged squeal, and Black Star's immediate shriek of terror, were deeply satisfying. The wild industrial cacophony of Junction City was much less so, and he stuck in his earplugs before he even ventured into the edges of the market place, a box of greenery beneath each arm.

He returned to the docks three hours later, exhausted and grumpy but with just enough money, to find the mechanic waiting impatiently and Maka breathing down Black Star's neck as he loaded down the ship with- "You bought _more_?" he asked her, brows shooting up.

She jumped guiltily and whipped around. Black Star cackled loudly. "Soul! Well, uh, yeah, I managed to haggle _her _down-" she pointed violently at the mechanic, who looked a bit shellshocked- "And these oxygen masks were on sale because Imperium just outdated them." She heaved a box bigger than she was on top of another, only just missing Black Star, and added, "Outdated, my gravity-defying ass!"

"Outdated them so everyone'll hafta buy their nice new model that's exactly the same, huh," Soul said, scowling.

"Come on! Are you really surprised? They pull that shit all the time," Black Star put in, shoving the final box up the loading ramp and wiping his forehead. "Also, that mechanic looks sketchy, are you sure you want her workin' on our baby?" The last was towards Maka, who craned her neck to peer dubiously at the grease-covered woman currently brandishing a wrench at the open guts of the _Razor's Edge_ with a rather unholy light in her eyes, dreadlocks swinging.

Soul adjusted his ears again, tilted his head, and picked up some of her mutterings. She had a deep voice for a woman, with the typical lyrical slurring of a lifelong Junction City citizen who'd grown up around innumerable different languages; it was nice, and he wondered absently what her singing would be like. "Look at this old barge, should've been junked a decade ago, I'm surprised it can get off the _ground-" _A deft twirl of the wrench- "But what a system it's got…"

"She's saying only nice things about our beautiful ship," he told Maka mildly; she relaxed a little at that.

"Good. It'll be fine, Black Star, and anyway it's got to be done," she said; Black Star shrugged philosophically, yawned, and wandered off in the direction of the nearest good smells, presumably to stuff his face with as much food as he could manage before they went offworld again. Even for a growing boy, he sure ate a lot. Soul didn't remember ever eating that much as a teenager, but then he and Black Star weren't exactly apples to apples.

The mechanic, having worked herself up sufficiently, dove inside the ship at last. Soul, seizing his opportunity, yanked Maka in for a kiss, ignoring her squeak at his stubbled jaw, and then brandished a bottle of rancid rice wine under her nose. She eyed it, flicking her precisely trimmed golden bangs from her eyes. "What's this?"

"For christening the ship," he explained. "You said you wanted to rename it." And what he thought of _that_ decision, of putting a new name to the place that had been their faithful home for so many years, across so much of the galaxy- well, he didn't like it, really, but then he hadn't harassed Maka enough yet to get her to fully explain her reasons, and usually she had good ones, even if it was like moving stars to get her to voice them.

"Oh." She smiled at him, the same wide lovely smile that had given him heart palpitations without fail since she turned fourteen, and then said, "Are we… going to drink it? Because I can smell it from here, and it smells like _hangover. _And, weirdly, fish, so..."

Damn. He drooped and regarded the bottle irritably. Things like this were much rarer now, but he'd lived the first eight years of his life in a culture that nobody but Wes remembered, and inevitably it led to occasional confusion. "I, uh, it must be a thing from… my people. I remembered it, I guess, I thought it was one of those thing everyone- well, you smash a bottle on the front of a ship when you christen it. It's good luck."

"Oh." She watched him for a long moment, carefully, searching his face. "Was it a song you were told?"

"My mother," he mumbled. "Sang one to me-"

"-Every night," she finished somberly. "I guess we might as well do it for Old Earth, hmm? Come on." She grabbed him by the hand- there went his heart again, jumping helplessly even after all this time, and he was a grown-ass man, dammit- and pulled him up the ladder onto the curve of the ship, where she scampered easily forward to the nose. He followed much more slowly, cringing and trying not to look down; rather ironically for a man who made his living planet-hopping, he'd always hated heights, and seeing Maka darting around fearlessly like she was twelve again didn't soothe him any. Their ship wasn't that big, but past a certain height it didn't matter; he'd make just the same stain on the ground.

"So what did your mother say?" she asked expectantly, once he'd made it to the tip of the ship. Several people on the ground were watching them curiously, and he felt himself flush.

"It's sort of, uh, silly. But we break the bottle and, that's it. Ship's renamed," he muttered, ducking his head. "Least that's all I remember."

"Like a baptism," she said, eyes going rather glassy. "I wonder if there's any record of that practice in the Old Earth archives- that's so _interesting-"_

"Focus and tell me the new name already," he prodded, smiling in spite of himself.

She blinked, spitting a piece of her wayward hair from her mouth as the sour-smelling wind whipped furiously around them, carrying the taint of inner Junction City. "Bullseye," she told him.

He studied her, caught the somber sweep of her lashes as she glanced away, and said, "Tell me why we're renaming it. After everything."

Maka took the bottle and sat down with a sigh, kicking her legs carelessly against the ship's surface. In that moment she looked very young. "Besides all the suspicious looks we get when we pull into port, you mean? It's a new start," she said, and they were simple words, but they terrified him like few he'd ever heard because he knew exactly what she meant.

"Oh, fuck it all, Maka," he snapped, angry, but she held a hand up, silently asking him to listen, and he gave in just as he always did, even as his fury grew.

"Look around," she began after a moment of thought, voice steady even if her eyes were pleading with him. She waved a hand toward the distant, looming immensity of Junction City, rolling clear over either horizon in a tangled, smoking spider-leg mess, circling clear round the planet, though of course they couldn't see it all. "Think about all the people who live here. They're all desperate to get on someone's ship just so they can get to some other planet where the Imperium can't control every single aspect of their lives. They want a little freedom, a little choice, just a _taste_. I just want to keep helping, that's all, I can't walk away, but the _Razor's Edge _is starting to get noticed in a bad way, and my parents- well- a name change seemed safer."

He kicked the hull of the ship. "That's a stupid dream those people have, isn't it?" he hissed violently. "Imperium goes everywhere, that's the _point _of it, they govern people, all of them, period, for the 'good of humanity', right? What are you getting at? You're always saying crazy shit like that and getting us on the watchlists! It's fucked, but what can two small-time planethoppers do about it, huh? Your terraforming helps but like you said, they're starting to _notice _us!"

She regarded him with an expression that would have fooled anyone but him into thinking she was calm. This close to her he knew that, if the winds hadn't been howling and various machinery creaking all around, he'd have been able to hear the nervous beat of her heart- the closest thing he'd ever found to a religion even with a life lived among all the stars. "I'm saying," she said composedly, "That no one government should control all of space. Planetary colonies should be able to establish their own laws, create their own healthy economies- they shouldn't be so taxed that they can't even survive!" She was on a roll now; Soul settled back grimly and waited with clenched fists, since nothing but an entire fleet of Imperium ships could stop her when she got like this.

But she surprised him, taking a deep, shaky breath that sounded just on the edge of broken and finishing with only, "Space belongs to the _people_ as individuals, to the ones like my parents who were brave enough to go out there and make it livable."

He stiffened at that. Her parents had chosen to go out into the darkness, to brave the incomprehensible vastness of space, just to help establish colonies on new planets, and he knew enough of them to know they'd had big dreams, huge hopes, just like their daughter. Her parents had wanted the colonies to be self-governed, safe places where old cultures could come together and renew- to be second chances for humanity, not the pathetic, dangerous places they were now, filled with only the worst, most desperate people, so that fewer and fewer honest folk ever dared to make the move. "It's a stupid dream," he told her again, swallowing and thinking of long-ago, dead, green eyes.

Maka sighed, brows pulling together wearily. "It's everyone's dream, even if they can't speak it." And of course she'd declared it her second job and her passion years ago, to help anyone and everyone who needed it, and Soul loved that, her bottomless heart- but still his mouth was dry and his palms damp. "And big enough dreams- well, sometimes they need a little help to get off the ground, but it's always worth it, and _someone's _got to do it." Maka, always giving and giving of herself until she was nothing but a hollow shell of snarling, snapping tension and clawing desperation- she'd been born among the endless stars and she'd never yet come down to earth and accepted her own limits.

It was possibly the thing he liked best about her, and yet it was the thing that terrified him the most. What she was talking about now was more than just helping out colonists without the right permits, or giving a cheap lift to someone trying to get to another planet- what she was talking about now was damned dangerous.

"It's not worth _everything_. Was it worth never knowing your parents?" he said quietly. Then, shocked by the ferocious fear on her face as her eyes flew open, he stood and left. His talented ears caught her tiny, pained, "Soul!" as he walked away.

He managed to get off the ship without breaking anything and then lurked in the shadow of the open cargo hold, watching her. She sat on her perch with her head bowed for a long time before uncorking the rice wine and pouring it out over the surface.

"The _Bullseye_," she said when she rejoined him on the ground, confidently, levelly, though her hands were twisting roughly at the edge of her shirt. "We'll have to get it registered properly still, but- I thought that would be fitting, because you and I- well, I've read that the bullseye is the only symbol that was universally found on Old Earth, across all the cultures. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Celtics. It linked all of humanity."

He was touched. Still, though- "Shouldn't decide that sort of thing all on your own," he told her.

She looked away, flushing slightly. "I know. I _am _sorry. I didn't exactly think about it, I just- I figured a name change would buy us a little time under the radar."

Good enough. He patted her on the head, then slid his hand around, cupping the velvety nape of her neck to give her a reassuring little shake. "The _Bullseye_. I like it. Sounds a bit like Imp propaganda to wanna connect all humanity, though, it's just the sort of garbage they'd spout." Indeed, there was a faded old poster visible on the docks just behind her, a stylized version of the Old Earth moon's cratered surface with the bold words, 'We reach always upward under Imperium's guidance.' He made a silent note to 'accidentally' direct the blaster's smoke in the thing's direction when they took off.

Maka smirked up at him. "Only if you don't know that I intend to connect all of humanity in shared independence, and peace, and knowledge."

"That's a tall order for a short woman," he informed her airily, even as his instincts told him to stop and reorder his thoughts under the crushing weight of such madness. Not that he hadn't seen something like this coming for a long time, as Maka got more and more furious at the Imperium's treatment of the colonial planets, but...

She, offended by his 'short' comment despite being well aware that she hadn't grown since she was fifteen, was in the process of blistering the paint off the _Bullseye_ when Stein appeared from nowhere, the half of his skull that was aluminum shining blindingly in the thin watery sun. "Captain, you'd best be careful with the things you say in public," he said reprovingly, giving the ship an affectionate thunk with his good fist. "I just passed a soldier calling you a Fletcher. It'll sour our sales even more if that dirty word gets stuck on the _Razor's Edge. _We were lucky to even get the new job, you know."

"It's the _Bullseye_ now," she breathed, like a saint having a vision; it only scared Soul all the more.

Stein jerked, fixed her with a wild gaze like murky swamp water, but then calmed himself with a visible effort. "Oh," he said, in a tone that promised later retribution and a possible poisoning. "Hm. I expect a _very _good reason for that. In the meantime, these two ladies would like to book passage to the Tethys colony." Two attractive blondes who seemed to have the same knack as Stein for being unseen while in plain sight popped up from behind him and waved, tense smiles stretching their faces; clearly they were trying very hard to make a good impression. One was a good bit taller, but it was clear as good glass that they were sisters; their faces were nearly identical, with the same pert upturned noses and strong brows. They had the same defensive hunch to their shoulders, too.

"Saturn's coldest moon," Maka said consideringly, giving the Tethys colony its common name. She beckoned the girls forward warmly. "I'm Maka Albarn, captain of the R- the _Bullseye._"

"Liz," said the taller girl, eyeing Soul with skepticism that she didn't even try to conceal. Annoyed, temper already frayed by Maka's ridiculous need to adopt every goddamn human in the universe like stray ratdogs, he smiled toothily and gave her a little wave. She flinched.

"And I'm Patti!" said the younger, much more cheerfully and with only a short glance at Soul's teeth. "Hallo!"

"So why d'you want to go to Tethys, hm?" Maka asked.

"Coz we do, that's all," said Liz sullenly, false smile suddenly failing and being replaced by an expression of purest drear.

Stein shook his prosthetic hand at her with a grinding _clank_, all the scalpels he'd welded to the fingertips fully extended like claws. "Manners, now! This is the finest ship in the system, you know!"

Liz looked as if the effort to not stare pointedly at the rusted, battered guardrail beneath her hand might actually kill her. "I can see that," she said through gritted teeth.

Patti appeared much more intrigued, big blue eyes wide. "I've never been in a spaceship," she said, standing on her tiptoes and peering interestedly into the cargo hold. "I mean, actually flown in one, that is. How long would it take us to get to the cold moon in this?"

"Oh, only about a month," Maka said dryly. "My ship's not the fastest thing, unfortunately. But if you want coldsleep, I can do it, and I do keep a registered doctor on board-" She pointed at Stein, who grinned cheerfully and waggled his scalpel-finger again. It didn't appear to reassure Liz one whit. "-but it'll cost extra."

"Oh," Liz said, clearly conflicted. "Well. It's just a month."

"A month in which I'll be feeding you," Maka informed her brightly. "So if you aren't bringing your own rations, they'll cost too."

"Fantastic," Liz said tightly. "Maybe we had better shop around a bit more."

Maka frowned at that. Soul heard Liz swallow, heard Patti inhale sharply as she looked pleadingly up at her sister, and something about that pose, the profile of the younger girl's face- "Maka, how do you feel about chocolate pudding for dinner?" he said, and she looked at him sharply. They hadn't had to use that code phrase for a while now, but there was no mistaking it now that he looked at the sisters. He'd seen their faces on the bounty channel.

"Sounds good," Maka said, and then she nudged the girls further up into the cargo hold while Stein stationed himself on the loading dock, just in case any soldiers came wandering by. "What did you two do?" she said abruptly once they were inside, voice pitched low. "And it's not that I care, or that I'll turn you in, but it's a risk for me to take anyone who's not authorized and I'm guessing your papers are bad forgeries, considering that _good _ones cost an awful lot and you appear to be hurting for money."

Liz clenched her jaw and took a step back, tugging Patti protectively close, and now Soul noticed her patched clothes and lack of luggage. "We didn't do anything!" She was thin and ragged, but the sparking steel in her eyes- if she'd had a gun on her, Soul would've been very nervous.

"So Imperium's after you," Maka concluded. "I told you, I won't turn you in."

"That's what I heard. About you, I mean, that you were safe," Liz mumbled, after a hard, considering look at Maka. "But- well- listen, this is all I have. Is it enough?" She held open a tattered wallet for their inspection.

_Cash_, Soul thought. _At least she's smart enough to do that much right._

"Er," Maka hedged, wincing. "It's… I hate to say this, but it's not. If I weren't so low on funds right now I'd take you anyway, but food is expensive, and I've got to pay my own people and put fuel in the tanks."

"Not to mention, we're a risk, right?" Liz growled aggressively, stomping her way back down the ramp with impressive flair and dragging a rather bemused-looking Patti behind her. "Fine, whatever, your shitty ship'd probably fall out of the sky."

Stein, clearly insulted on behalf of his beloved ship, narrowed his eyes at her; considering that his false one was currently glowing bright orange and had a few stray wires sticking out like horrific eyelashes, it was extra intimidating.

Before he could do anything, though, a gentle voice said quietly, "I need passage as well. Perhaps we could pool our funds?"

Liz stopped mid-step to blink at the willowy woman who'd appeared, a shadow-haired vision in expensive clothes, pale hands clasped delicately. "Who the hell are you?"

The woman smiled gently, and damn, but she was gorgeous in a way that seemed surreal and improbable; every inch of her screamed not only good breeding but wealth, from her fresh manicure to her immaculate outfit. "My name's Tsubaki," she said, looking directly at Maka with something like pleading in her lovely eyes. "I need very much to get off this planet, please, but I'm not- I need passage as well." She didn't lower her voice much, but Soul noticed she'd timed her words to coincide with a moment where nobody happened to be passing nearby their ship, which was really interesting. Come to think of it, she hadn't given a surname, either.

"Huh. And you just want to help pay for us?" Liz barked, eyes narrowed. "Why?"

Tsubaki shrugged. Even that tiny motion was graceful, and Soul mentally ratcheted his estimation of her class up several notches. "Why not? It would make the trip more congenial for me to have company, and it would make things easier on both of us to know someone once we reach Tethys."

Liz stared at her, distrust writ clear on her face, but her desperation was just as obvious. Finally she said, "We won't owe you anything?"

"Not at all," Tsubaki said pleasantly, with a gracious little nod. She looked _very_ out of place at the grungy docks. Several men a little ways behind her, doing some welding on their own ship, actually looked so distracted that a fire was probably imminent.

"It would be nice if someone consulted the _captain_ about this arrangement," Maka said to nobody, trying halfheartedly and failing to hide her pleased grin. "Well, come on, then. Tsubaki, if you show me your cash I'll give you the tour. We'll be leaving tonight, so if you've got any luggage let me know." All three girls shook their heads. Maka raised a brow as she ushered them aboard again, taking them through the cargo space and then through the door that led to the living quarters, boots clomping loudly on the winding metal catwalk. "So you two can share a room, right? And Tsubaki, just what _exactly_ has a nice girl like you buying passage on a notorious ship like mine, hmm?" After that the door closed and her voice faded even beyond Soul's hearing, but he managed to catch Tsubaki's startled, "Oh!"

"That rich girl's going to be trouble," Stein said, yawning so widely that his false eye looked in danger of popping out. "She's running from something just like those blondes."

"Probably," Soul agreed, rubbing his temples. "How is it we always manage to pick up a boatload of strays at every planet?"

"Maka's always been like that, though," Stein pointed out. "Just like her mother was."

"True." Still, Soul couldn't quite shake the dismal cloud over his head as he went inside to finish preparing for takeoff. He stepped very carefully over the old bloodstains where Maka's parents had died, just as he always did, and wished silently for the thousandth time that she'd just pay to replace the damn floor instead of ferrying another charity case across space.

* * *

><p>"Excuse me?" Maka snapped disbelievingly, feeling her blood pressure skyrocket. She counted to ten very carefully, just as Stein had taught her, and then said through gritted teeth, "Our papers were all inspected when we docked. We've done everything by the book and you're delaying our departure for no good reason. I have <em>passengers<em> who want to get moving already!"

"Sorry," said the dock supervisor, who didn't look sorry at all. "Orders are orders, ma'am, and I was ordered to find this ship and inspect the paperwork of every passenger. That includes your, uh, pilot." He jerked his chin at Soul, who was looking moodier than usual, shoulders slumped and hands shoved in his pockets.

"It's insulting," Maka hissed, hating the hang-dog look on Soul's face and knowing that this second inspection was all her fault. If her ship hadn't gotten flagged by the Imperium as dangerously disobedient they'd be in the air already.

"It's fine," Soul said, right on cue before she could _really_ start making a scene. She bit her lip till it hurt as he shuffled forward and shoved his wonderfully forged paperwork under the supervisor's nose. They'd paid a ridiculous amount for those papers years ago, and so far they'd held up well and convinced the Imperium that Soul was indeed a properly documented human, but there was always the danger that one day things would go wrong.

She forced herself to relax, at least on the outside, and waited tensely until the supervisor handed Soul's papers back with a disinterested grunt. "There, was that so hard?" he said to her, already turned to go.

She gritted her teeth and smacked the button to close the cargo hold's door, just soon enough that the supervisor would have to scamper to make it out. The door crunched closed with a worrying amount of noise, but then it was blessedly silent inside the ship, and she breathed out a shaky sigh as the repaired life support system kicked on with a loud whoosh.

"Soul," she said. "I'm sorry."

He only smiled patiently, and she nearly melted. "It's fine."

"It's not," she told him quietly, feeling the weight of everything bow her shoulders. He only stepped close and put his hands on her waist, thumbs stroking reassuringly up her ribs; she leaned into him with a soft huff of breath, looking down and watching the way her own boots stood firmly atop the bloodstain that was the only reminder of her mother, and the way Soul's own feet were planted on either side of it. He'd asked her once why she'd left the stains there for so long, and she'd only barely managed to explain, past the guilt and the loneliness and the old scars, that she simply didn't _remember_ her parents. "I get so tired sometimes," she admitted, closing her eyes and leaning her forehead against his chest. "It's just- there's so much to do, so many people to help, and I can't sleep if I ignore it, but I can't sleep _anyway_ because I'm so scared."

He tucked her head under his chin and gave a soothing little trill, the same one that he'd told her long ago meant something like 'I love you'. "Don't be scared. We'll be okay. We'll keep helping people just like we always have, and we'll keep being smart about it."

"Yeah," she said, but it came out much less convincing than she'd have liked.

He trilled again, a soft loving warble that brought dangerous dampness to her eyes. "I wish you'd quit with the worrying. It's not good for you, and anyway I'm with you to the end, remember?"

To the end, they'd always said, all their lives, and the words still made her feel weak all over. "Yeah." She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head so she could listen to his heart beat.

"Hey. We helped those girls, didn't we? They'd never have gotten outta Junction City if we weren't idiots willing to take a risk," he said encouragingly. "Right?"

"Right…"

"And we helped Black Star stay outta the Imp orphanages, didn't we? Universe knows the idiot kid needs all the help he can get!"

"Right," she said, laughing a little in spite of everything. "Come on, pilot, go do your thing and get us flying."

"Yes, captain," he said, saluting with an astonishing amount of sarcasm. She rolled her eyes extravagantly as they left the bloodstains behind.

* * *

><p><em>Stein woke in so much pain that he prayed, for the first time in decades, for death. It didn't come, unsurprisingly; he'd never been a lucky man in any sense.<em>

_After a long time, he managed to open one eye. The other didn't seem to be cooperating, and he could guess why from the stiff pull of dried gore spattering the entire side of his face. It took a long moment for him to realize he'd been laid out on one of the ship's coldsleep beds, and still longer to recognize the fuzzy thing beneath his hand- it seemed he had only one left, and thank the universe it was his deft right hand- as Maka's housewolf plushie._

Maka_- he jolted upright, and then everything pulled and he screamed._

_The screaming hurt his throat, but it made him feel ever so marginally better, as did the blistering profanity he eventually drifted into. He concentrated on his breathing, trying to control his bounding heart by sheer willpower, fingers of his good hand twitching as he resisted the urge to claw at his red-hot, throbbing face. _

"_Alive," he said thickly, lifting the blackened stump of his wrist up in front of his face, nausea rolling in his stomach as his own smell finally hit him, barbecue and sour sweat._

_And Marie was-_

_He leaned over the edge of the coldsleep bed and vomited, aware even as he did so that he was showing all the signs of head trauma, aware that he had no fucking idea how he'd gotten from that cursed cargo hold to here. Hadn't he glimpsed Kami blasting the door into a melted mess? _

_Something in the doorway made a sound like a trickling brook, faint and light, and Stein's head snapped up as fear tightened aching muscles._

_The younger alien boy was there, scrawny, red eyes very wide beneath that wild white hair, and he had his hands on Maka's shoulders. _

_The fear grew until Stein's ravaged body felt like it might fly apart from his own heartbeat. "Get away from her," he hissed, quivering, maddened._

_The boy squinted at him, tilted his head curiously, and made another lilting sound with an inquisitive lift at the end._

"_Get away from her," Stein said again, tiredly, more for the sake of it than anything else. It was obvious now he really looked that the boy wouldn't hurt her, in fact he was practically hiding behind her, and he was a small thing anyway. _

_Maka smiled, finally, showing off the gap where both her front teeth were missing. Stein noticed with a sense of surrealism that she'd tried to do her own pigtails; they were lopsided and frizzy. "Hi, Stein," she said. "You been sleeping."_

_He gaped at her, and then, to his own ridiculous shame, he started to cry, gasping, shuddering sobs that ended in high whines as his shredded body shook. The children edged closer together, and the white-haired boy put a protective arm around Maka's shoulders, pulling her back into him and making more sounds, almost frantically._

"_Stein," Maka said unhappily, wriggling free of the boy and padding cautiously closer, little brow furrowed. "You okay? Stein?" She said his name just as she always had, perfectly clearly even though she stumbled over her own, and he closed the eye he had left, gripping the edge of the table hard with his right hand, clawing for control._

"_Where is everybody?" he asked her, when he could speak without feeling a scream bubble up behind the words. "Where are your- where's Mama and Papa?"_

_She regarded him fretfully, shrinking back a little; the alien boy, still lurking fearfully in the doorway, made another high-pitched sound, and she ran back to him. "Mama's in the big room," she told Stein, peering over her shoulder as the alien gave Stein a clearly suspicious glance. _

_The cargo hold, then, and still… dead. "How did I get here?" he pushed. _

_She looked away, frowning, fiddling with the edges of her little shirt. He had to repeat himself twice before she said petulantly, "He brought you."_

"_Who? The- the other one?" Stein pointed at the boy holding her._

_She nodded. "Yeah, he brought you."_

_How the hell had they gotten into the cargo hold in the first place, and how had that scrawny boy- teenager, probably, but still- managed to haul Stein all this way? It took a moment of searching, but the bloodied sheets wadded in the corner of the room told the story._

_So they were smart, then, capable of using tools, and clearly they had some sort of language, judging by the younger boy's noises; right now he was petting one of Maka's pigtails and crooning low in his throat, even as he kept a wary eye on Stein._

_Maka watched as Stein tried to stand, pulling harder on the bottom of her shirt. "Don't hurt him," she whimpered._

"_What?"_

"_Don't hurt him," she said again, clutching the boy's arm possessively. "Don't. He's nice. He, he helped."_

_Stein watched them for a long moment with his blurred vision, feet dangling off the table, then held out her stuffed animal silently. She looked at it for a moment, then shrugged and turned, pulling the boy behind her, and he followed placidly enough, but not without a final wary glare and a shining flash of predatory fangs._


	3. Chapter Two

Seen on the display screen from above as they orbited it, Tethys was richly blue from its melted ice, nearly all ocean. Maka thought it looked rather pretty, wrapped with delicate wisps of white atmosphere with the pale pastels of massive Saturn shining behind it. Tethys looked good and healthy and deceptively clean- but every planet was lovely from far away. Liz looked a bit ill at the sight, though whether from nerves or something else, Maka didn't know. Nonetheless, it was making her nervous too- emotions had always been contagious to her in the most annoying, inconvenient ways. Soul called it empathy, while she called it a pain in the ass and a sign of an overactive imagination.

"We'd better go eat," she said, patting the younger girl on the shoulder despite knowing by now that Liz would jump and slide away at the touch. "I just thought you'd like to see it."

"Oh. Yeah." Liz, ever motivated by food, trailed her faithfully to the tiny mess hall, which doubled as a dumping ground for Stein's experiments. Currently he'd festooned the pantry lockers with the vines of some kind of fly-trap hybrid that were growing aggressively each day and seemed to enjoy Black Star's blood in particular- or maybe he was just the only one foolhardy enough to get within reach.

Everyone else was already sitting down, waiting with varying levels of impatience. Soul stood up with a scrape of chair legs when he saw her, a ladle sticking out from the pocket of his apron. "Captain," he said with a nod.

"Pilot." They shared a heated smile that was very at odds with the formal greetings, and she could just _feel_ Black Star itching yet again to ask if they were together or not- teasing the little bastard was really one of the more rewarding parts of her day. "We should be out of orbit and on the planet's surface soon," she told everyone, sitting down. "Soon's they get around to sending someone for our paperwork, anyway."

"Very inefficient system," Stein observed, displeased, before tenderly feeding his flytraps a scrap of gristle. Maka couldn't argue, really. It _was_ inefficient to have to wait for an actual person to shuttle up to the _Bullseye_, but simply sending electronic copies of paperwork had proven long ago to be far too easy for lawbreakers to get around.

"Gross," Black Star said, watching the fly trap warily.

"Don't be rude," Stein told him.

Black Star leapt to his feet in indignation, flailing and only just missing whacking Soul over the head with his spoon. Several tiny metal screws fell out of his pockets and a wrench impaled his rice. "What! I'm never rude! Never! I am polite and friendly to _everyone_, even if they're stupid and lame! That's why I've got friends on every planet!"

Liz and Tsubaki broke into identical peals of laughter at that ridiculous proclamation, then paused to eye each other suspiciously. Patti just giggled into her napkin. "You're rude all the time," she said cheerfully. "Just yesterday you made fun of my hair."

He regarded her with typical teenage sullenness. "So? You made fun of mine first."

If his lower lip stuck out any further he'd trip on the damn thing; Maka was hard pressed to keep from giggling herself, especially when Patti said solemnly, "Yeah, but yours is _blue."_

The argument degenerated into some ferocious arm-wrestling, in which scrawny Patti appeared, amusingly, to be holding her own. Liz, cheeks stuffed to bulging, cheered them on with a wild whoop that sent bread crumbs spraying across the table, and Tsubaki laughed again, high and pure. Maka caught Soul cocking his head towards her and discreetly adjusting his ears, as he often did whenever he found someone with a particularly interesting or lovely voice, and she sighed just a little. Trust _her_, with her own screechy, rapid speaking voice, to fall madly in love with an alien who got off on pretty sounds.

Just then he caught her gaze, and his slow, toothy smile reminded her that they'd had _far_ too little alone time during the last month's journey, what with a ship crowded full of rowdy passengers. Suddenly, despite the current lively, congenial atmosphere that was so unusual during meals here, Maka was very eager indeed to get everyone off her damn ship.

Eventually Black Star won the arm-wrestling match, though only by a hair and some totally illegal, if creative, weaponization of his rice, and the meal settled down a little. For dessert, Soul brought out seven little ramekins of butterscotch pudding with a flourish. "Since it's probably our last meal together," he explained happily. "Or, you know, whatever."

"You big softie," Patti said, diving in delightedly and very deftly jabbing Black Star in the ribs with her spoon as he tried to steal some. He scowled and turned ridiculous puppy eyes on Tsubaki, who blushed prettily and offered him half, much to Stein's visible disgust.

"You _are_ a big softie, you know," Maka told Soul quietly as they watched the others chitchat.

"No way," he denied, lips curving.

Liz, ever watchful, blinked at them as if they were a particularly interesting puzzle. "How old are you guys, anyway?" she said, fiddling with her pudding.

"Don't you know it's rude to ask a lady her age?" Soul snickered.

Maka took a cue from Patti and elbowed him sharply in the ribs while smiling sweetly at Liz. "I'm forty-five if you want to get really technical, I was born in 2452, but an awful lot of that's been spent on ice. Coldsleep tends to make age a bit of a pesky thing to pin down," she said honestly.

Liz gaped at her. "Really? Forty-five? Holy _cow_, and not a wrinkle. Maybe I ought to look into this planethopper thing."

Maka forced a smile at that, even though it very much soured her mood to even think of a bright thing like Liz, who had a whole new, hopefully shining future ahead of her in the Tethys colony, becoming a planethopper and whiling away her life in the void while time moved on around her. It was all the more painful because Liz, quite obviously, expected _nothing_ from life in general, other than hurt and difficulty; she was too young to be so jaded, but there it was, and it wasn't unusual at all in this day and age. "I'd say I'm about twenty-five or twenty-six, as far as time spent _awake_ goes," she said reflectively, after a fair bit of mental gyration. "It's usually at least several months going between planets…"

"It's probably in the ship's systems somewhere," Black Star offered, licking his ramekin and watching her with those cunning green eyes of his, the ones that, irritatingly, rarely missed a thing. "I could look it up if you really want to know. I mean, you always use the same coldbed, and you've always been on this ship, so I can do some math…"

"Don't bother. It doesn't really matter, anyway," she said, and then, touched by his offer to actually do _math _for her, she lunged forward and ruffled his hair while he was distracted by a very unsuspecting Tsubaki's cleavage.

"Argh!" he wailed. Another wrench fell out of his pocket, and a creeping vine stole up and dragged it away immediately; Stein wiped his good eye like a proud father.

"What?" she said innocently, laughing at Black Star's deeply offended face. "You're almost nineteen, I won't be able to do that for long, will I?" It was true; he was finally getting taller than she was. She sort of _missed_ the days when he'd been a wide-eyed, gangly little twelve-year-old freshly escaped- for the sixth time- from the orphanage. Stowing away on her ship had been the last thing she'd ever expected a runaway to do, but it had turned out to be a wonderful coincidence for everyone.

"You can't do it _now," _he protested, even though she just had. "I'm a man, dammit!"

"You're not a _man _until you can outdrink me," Stein said calmly. "I've told you that, boy."

"But you're-" Tsubaki's eyes skimmed his various metal bits. She was obviously too well-bred to quite finish that thought, but Liz wasn't.

"You're a walking tin can," she exclaimed. "Isn't that cheating? With your better body? All the cyborgs I ever knew back in Junction City could outdrink a fish!" And just what kind of places had she been hanging out in, that she knew such things, Maka wondered- but then Liz was obviously quite familiar with the darker side of things, and Junction City had plenty of _dark_ for any growing girl to play in.

Stein snorted. "I've got half a liver, girl, and this monkey still can't outdrink me."

"Livers _regenerate_," Black Star said snottily, stealing Tsubaki's ramekin to lick clean without an ounce of shame; she only blinked mildly at him. "I think you meant you've got half a brain, old man!"

Stein's eyes narrowed, but then he rapped his metal knuckles on his partially metal skull with a clank. "_Obviously," _he sneered, before rising slowly to his feet and pointing a false hand suddenly bristling with scalpels at Black Star. "Care to continue along that line of conversation? I'm sure my flytraps could digest you, given enough time. If you were in small enough _pieces._"

Black Star went rather pale and dived wildly out the door, muttering something about bravery in retreat; the whole table, Stein included, dissolved in helpless mirth.

Maka, basking delightedly in everything, decided that maybe she'd persuade her next customers to forego coldsleep as well. It was _nice_ to have company.

Soul caught her eye again and the corners of his mouth tipped up a little. "Not bad, huh?" he said softly, with a contented little burble.

Patti, who'd begun collecting the dishes, looked at him inquiringly. "Why do you do that?"

He tensed. "Do what?"

"You make those little noises. Like singing but not." She shrugged. "I like them. My mom used to sing to me when I was little." Patti said it very matter-of-factly, but a flash of pain crossed Liz's face, and she busied herself in ripping her napkin to tiny shreds; yet again Maka wondered just what the sisters had gone through, to make them so steely and stern at not even twenty years old.

"It's- um, a different language. A very old one. My first language," Soul said at last, surprisingly open. Maka looked at him, startled, but instead of the defensive look he usually wore when someone was pressing about his past, he was merely watching Patti carefully. "You really like it?"

"Mmhmm." She nodded. "They're good sounds. Do you think people sing on Tethys?"

"If they don't, we'll make 'em," Liz said. "I can sing. Yanno, if I'm a bit drunk."

"Good plan," Soul told them both, rising to help Patti with the dishes. "It's gonna be hard down there, you know that, right? Colonies get the dregs, the criminals and the poor folk, usually. It's all the Imperium will _let _immigrate in. They want cheap labor."

"We'll all be fine," Tsubaki said confidently, apparently having lumped herself in with the sisters at some point. "I'm sure we can find work."

"Just be safe. Stick with Liz, she knows what's up," Maka advised.

Tsubaki looked at her rather coolly. "You'd be surprised what I know," she said, and her tone was just as smooth and calm as it ever was, but there was a dangerous spark in her eyes that had Maka scrambling to recalibrate and just a little wary, because suddenly she realized how neatly Tsubaki always slid out of giving any real answers.

Before she could say anything, though, a buzzing sound hit her ears from the intercom. "That'll be the Tethys official asking to board," she said, standing up and hastily slurping the last of her pudding. "Come on, everyone, let's get all this paperwork nonsense sorted out and get you three to your new home!" She threw in a massively cheery smile that actually hurt her face; Soul snorted loudly at her.

"Wonderful," Liz mumbled, looking vaguely green.

Maka paused at that, uneasy. "Is there going to be a problem we'll need to deal with?" she said directly.

"Noooo," Liz said, but it was reluctant.

"Fantastic." The last, the very _last_ thing that Maka needed was to be caught shipping _another _batch of illegal colonists; the old excuse of, "What do you mean, their papers are fake?" only worked a few times, and she'd used it far more than a few. She'd only taken the quickest of looks at Liz's paperwork, assuming that a girl so obviously streetwise would have at least gotten reasonably passable fakes, but now Liz was moving steadily from green to chalk-white, and Patti was uncharacteristically silent too. It was almost painful to see. "Don't worry, we'll get you both down there safe," Maka told them both, and she meant it. Liz's answering smile was wobbly, but a vast improvement, and they all left to face the music with firm steps.

* * *

><p>"At least he took the bribe," Maka said encouragingly, trying very hard to be positive despite the whanging stress headache she'd developed halfway through their desperate finagling with the atrociously corrupt Tethys immigration official. It could have been worse, but it also could have been much better. So much for her ship's 'fresh start'<p>

Liz, who was back to green, only snarled, "Yeah, and now the asshole will remember us forever as _targets_, that's the last thing I need on a new planet!"

"You could tell Tsubaki thank you for paying him off, you know," put in Black Star smugly, apparently still stewing over their dinner conversation and determined to prove he could be polite.

Liz squinted at him ill-temperedly. "She's too old for you, kid."

He went hideously red in a way he hadn't done in years. "Wha- you're nuts! You're totally nuts, lady, and I hope you drown down on that stupid moon!"

"We're going down there too, you know," Maka put in, for once not bothering to try and stifle her laughter. Judging by Black Star's appraising, pleased expression, she hadn't been laughing enough lately. "We're gonna drop our passengers off personally, safe and sound on the ground."

"That's not necessary-" Liz started.

"It is," Maka said. "We need to refuel, we need rations, I have some cargo to sell, I want to take a look at the terraforming up close… I haven't been to the coldest moon in probably twenty years, it'll be worth a visit. Besides, I like to get some dirt between my toes every now and then, I spend enough time up in the stars." Actually, she needed to make some money before she could really go anywhere; they badly needed to refuel.

"Anyway, you don't want to ride the shuttles down," Black Star said darkly to Liz. "Sometimes people get on and never get off, especially pretty girls."

Liz sighed, and her very lack of surprise at his words spoke volumes. "Yeah, I figured. 'S part of why we didn't bring any luggage. Nothin' to steal, you know? But if you're docking anyway, I mean, I guess we can do that."

"I'll go ask for air control clearance," Soul sighed, ignoring the stairs and swinging lithely up onto the catwalk with both hands before tromping towards the control room. Before long they were shuddering hotly down through the atmosphere, shooting through the deceptively misty clouds with force that was jarring to the bone, but with his usual smoothness Soul kept tight control and settled them safely on solid ground.

* * *

><p>Twenty years had been an understatement; Maka hadn't been to Tethys since she was thirteen, which meant around thirty years had passed on the moon, and in truth she hardly remembered it. Seeing it now- well, the dampness of the thin air was familiar, and the severe chill, but the rest was shocking. She was staring like an absolute idiot, but she couldn't seem to stop, even as the wind shrieked and pulled at her where she stood high atop the ship docks. The sea was far below, lit by the ghostly glow of all Saturn's many moons and peppered by round artificial islands linked by innumerable flexible bridges and packed to the gills with glowing skyscrapers- obviously the lack of square footage had led to a philosophy of <em>up<em> rather than out. It was a complex neon spiderweb, all the islands cunningly and perfectly placed to protect their greenery and to shield the inhabitants, and Maka _recognized_ the style of it.

Soul read her before she could even manage to get her own brain working straight and put a hand discreetly on her elbow, looking at her with those wide astonishing eyes. "Okay?" he asked quietly.

Damn it all, but she _wasn't_, and she wished Stein would have thought to warn her, though she knew he didn't like to think about the _Bullseye's_ original crew. "It's my mother," she sighed, putting her palms over her eyes and pushing until she could see all the stars of a thousand nebulae. "I'd forgotten-" And that brought its own unique guilt- "But she… this was the second planet she ever terraformed. It was in her journals."

"Oh," he said thoughtfully, and then he tucked his chin on her shoulder and stared down at the web of glittering islands for a while, shivering slightly. "I like how the wind sounds here," he said at last, trapping her hair beneath his hands as it finally started to annoy him. "Sounds like someone forgot to feed it."

"I don't like it," she said truthfully. The wind on this moon was angry, whipping furiously forward over the restless water with no mountains to soften its fury.

He smiled against her neck. "Well, I always did like things with a temper. Let's get inside, then."

She followed meekly. The ship was so cold inside that their breath plumed out white in front of them, but she really didn't have the cash to waste fuel on heating it, not after feeding four ravenous teenagers for a month. Everyone was holed up in their cabins, it seemed, probably drowning in blankets; the three girls had planned to leave that night, but Maka, not wanting to let them wander around a strange planet and end up sleeping universe knew where, had insisted they sleep onboard. She'd be parked for a week or so anyway, at least, so they might as well; at least that's what she'd told Black Star when he gave her a knowing glance.

She shivered as a gust of wind blew hard enough to be audible even inside the _Bullseye_. This place was ice cold in more ways than one, but perhaps the islands down below were better. Anyway, it wasn't as if Soul was particularly averse to keeping her warm.

He seemed to feel her gaze and turned, brows raised. "Yeees, Captain?" he drawled. "Did you need something, Captain? Hey, Captain, do you- mmpf!"

She tackled him as if they were kids again, and he laughed high and wild like the wind as he pried her off and slung her over one shoulder, practically sprinting to her quarters.

* * *

><p>"Gold," Tsubaki said. There was heat in her eyes like anger, but deeper and colder all at once. "And helium, and iron. I've seen this before. They've set up all these drills to hit the ocean's bottom. They're mining for resources, which explains all the soldiers."<p>

Maka was speechless, so Soul voiced her thoughts for her. "Fuckin' ugly," he pronounced, looking all around in disgust at the towering, crowded factories belching black smoke. "And they're fucking up the terraforming already, the assholes, they _know _it takes at least a few centuries to get an ecosystem goin' steady, what the fuck were they thinking?"

"There were thinking money," Black Star said grimly. "And they were thinkin' if they ship in a bunch of prisoners, they won't have to pay 'em as much." That explained the furtive, hungry looks on the faces of every single colonist they'd passed.

"I didn't know there was so much development on Tethys," Liz mumbled, rubbing her temples.

"It comes fast, and news goes slow through space," Maka told her. "Doesn't mean there aren't other jobs. There are still plenty of farmers here, plenty of _good _people trying to make it work. You'll just have to be careful." Liz's irritated scowl said she knew that very well, _thank you_, so Maka sighed and shut up, taking another look around instead.

This was one of the larger islands, probably ten miles square, and it was fringed by several underwater drilling rigs, gross hulking things rusted from the water; they stuck out like horrid mockeries of trees above the lavish plant life still clinging to the island's surface, and the air was already tainted with smoke from the refining plant looming just to the east. Pigeons- rats of the sky, invincible, found somehow on every goddamn planet humans had touched- still flew, still made their idiotic cooing sounds, and there were doubtless still fish in the water, carefully chosen species that would breed quickly, but it was always a thin balance at best, and no doubt the colonists were feeling the pressure of trying to feed their families while being taxed so the soldiers and factory workers could eat too.

It was dark and depressing, and she knew without having seen them that the homesteads on the other islands would be bitter places, scraped out desperately from the earth, full of hard-eyed people who hadn't had a full belly in weeks, even as the planet they had pledged to protect was ripped to pieces and carried away by a hundred Imperium ships. Suddenly she was deeply relieved that she owned the _Bullseye_, her ticket to freedom, even as she was ashamed for thinking such a thing.

"Soul," she said. "I don't like this. I don't like looking at it."

He regarded her wearily. "No way around it. We better get moving and figure out a way to make some cash."

No way around it, huh. She smiled at him, all teeth, and he tensed. "Yeah, you're right. Black Star! Stein!" Her crew snapped to attention, though Stein quirked a brow at her. "Let's go find a market somewhere and hustle. Stein, can you go see if there are any Imp 'forming jobs that we could put in a bid on?"

The eyebrow rose higher. "Been a few years since you terraformed for Imperium, Captain."

She shrugged, mind working at light speed. "Needs must, enemies closer, all that. Go on, scatter."

Black Star lingered. "Tsubaki asked for my help lookin' for someplace for them all to live," he started, fidgeting madly.

"Ah. Go on, then," Maka said, flapping her hands, and the young people headed off, Black Star with a suspicious puff to his chest as he strode beside Tsubaki. Maka approved silently of his attitude; she'd told him to keep an eye on Tsubaki, to try and figure out what the girl was hiding, and he'd come up with the perfect excuse to spend more time with her.

"See you later," she said grimly to the factory, craning her neck back to see the Imperium logo shining brightly above her, far bluer than the polluted sky.

The fences were simple chainlink, she noticed, and they weren't wired to any sort of alarm. Interesting.

* * *

><p><em>Maka, my little girl, tiny devil daughter.<em>

_You're asleep right now. I think Spirit finally tired you out, thank goodness, because how something so small as you can make such loud noises is beyond me. I love you so much. I hope your voice is always loud, I hope you're never silenced._

_Having a child is terrifying, really, and it's a good thing I've got this diary, because your father would throw a fit if I ever admitted how much it scares me to think of your future and all the things I want for you. He adores you so much. It's funny, I never thought he'd be much of a father, let alone a man, but perhaps he just needed someone to motivate him._

_But back to how terrifying you are. All I can think of when I see you sleeping is: Who'll break her heart for the first time? Will she be lonely or sad? How hard will her life be? Will she be smart, will she learn early that hard work is the most important thing, as I did? Will she learn to see the symphony in an ecosystem, in the play of fungus and moss and insects? Will she be angry with me, that I kept her on a ship hopping planets for her whole childhood? _

_But I can't help that, Maka, I can't. There's simply too much to do. There are too many people who need my help. I touch down on one rough planet and see people who are hungry, who are fighting impossible odds, but their eyes are still bright- and then the next planet is a marvel of human ingenuity, a perfect embroidery of technology and wonder and neon lights, filled with people who have eyes dulled from a life of ease and acceptance, people who never question, who never know that their little luxuries are torn from the mouths of others. _

_Those cities, the few big ones, they're built on the backs of colonists too, on the efforts of those who came before, and yet who thinks of that now? _

_These are the things (a few out of a thousand) that I worry about. I worry that you'll be a colonist, scraping in the dirt to build a future for thankless generations to come, and dying early, and yet I worry too that you'll be prisoner in one of those cities with your feet in the mud and your eyes closed tight to injustice._

_I don't know how to manage these fears, my little girl, and I'm afraid every day that I'm not teaching you well enough the things you'll need to survive in the world, and I love you so much that I can hardly breathe._

_Keep your voice loud, sweetheart, and keep your hands outstretched towards anyone you can help. It all comes back around, I promise._

_Remember the stories I tell you, and that to be a hero you simply have to choose._

* * *

><p>"What the <em>hell <em>are you doing?"

Maka leapt a good three feet in the air with a strangled whimper and nearly clocked her head on the steps up to the catwalk. "Liz! I- I didn't think you'd be up, it's so cold out!"

"Yeah, it is." Two blue eyes peered distrustfully out from the massive blanket Liz was wrapped head to toe in. She puffed out a frosted breath like a frustrated dragon before adding, "For someone who was recommended to me as not caring much about the law, you're a shitty sneaker."

"I'm not _sneaking," _Maka yelped.

Blue eyes narrowed even further, and the blanket took on a rather angry hunch. "Yeah, right, and I'm gonna go join the army. What are you doin'?"

"I, uh…" Dammit all, this was ridiculous. Maka took a deep breath, tried to adopt an authoritative pose worthy of her station, and set her feet defiantly wide apart on the _Bullseye's_ catwalk. "I was doing captain things. Privately. Private, but _not _secret things."

"_Hmm_." How could a girl so much younger infuse such school-marm disapproval in one syllable? Maka wilted. "So the fact that I saw you slithering out of here four hours ago has nothing to do with anything?" Liz said pointedly.

Maka's discomfit snowballed. "Er- I- I was-"

Liz shoved the rest of her face free of the blanket and, unexpectedly, flashed a wide grin. "Come on, _Captain, _loosen up. Trust me, there ain't a thing you can tell me that'll 'corrupt me' or anything, too late for that!"

Maka, all too aware of how unhappy Soul would be with the insane risk she'd just taken and that he'd only be upset once she told him, blew out a rough breath and decided, _what the hell_. At least Liz would cheer her on. Probably. "I just fucked the biggest Imperium processing plant in a hundred miles all to hell," she confessed, rather giddily, still riding the waves of fizzing adrenaline and more than a little drunk on the frigid Tethys night air. "A while ago I got my hands on a bacterium that feeds on iron like a politician on souls, and some of it just might have gotten out in their building. Somehow. And somehow their very expensive machinery will be falling to bits in a few weeks. They'll have to pay the colonists to help them, and they'll pay a _lot._"

There was a long, long moment of silence, then an impressed huff of breath. "Somehow," Liz echoed agreeably, snickering and retreating back into her blanket. "You're insane. I like you more now. But still, insane."

"I've been called worse by better," Maka said, laughing a little herself even as she shivered. "I _am_ insane, aren't I?" Wasn't that the brutal truth. She'd been so stupid, she'd almost gotten caught three times, she'd had to cut through _two _fences with clippers stolen from Black Star's toolbox, but by all the stars, it had been _worth _it, racing through the freezing dark and the narrow fog-damp streets with her heart in her throat.

"Did a good thing, though. It'll take months for Imperium to get that problem dealt with, and the colonists will get a nice break," Liz said thoughtfully, shuffling her socked feet. "I'm guessing that bacteria is just wildly illegal."

"Yeah..."

"Awesome." Liz was smiling again, ear to ear, and Maka thought absently that it was the youngest she'd ever looked, and the prettiest, even in the unflattering bluish light of the cargo hold's glowstrips.

"So do you think-" A loud clanging on the door of the hold interrupted her, and there was her heart again, making a bid for freedom by pounding right out of her chest. "Shit," Maka hissed, and then she grabbed Liz by the shoulders and shoved her in the direction of the living quarters. "Go on! Get! Wait, no, go get- get Stein! Or Soul!"

Liz staggered. "What?"

"Go get Soul!" Maka repeated, and, to her credit, Liz didn't waste anymore time, but instead charged off into the ship's cold darkness as the clanging went on.

Maka was cool and calm, at least on the outside, when the cargo hold door opened. "Yes?" she said pleasantly, adding a yawn, just to make it clear she'd only just woken up- she'd kicked off her boots too, into the darkness behind her crates, to add to the impression.

The man staring at her, his dock security badge shining bright against his crisp Imperium blues, looked unimpressed as he lifted his lightstick higher. "Sorry for the late hour, but your radio was off. I need to talk to the captain of this, uh, ship."

"That'd be me," she said pleasantly, with just the tiniest bite to her tone. A piece of her marvelled at how calm she managed to sound, even as she had to clench her hands to keep them from shaking. Vague voices in the night and flashing lights told her that her ship wasn't the only one being investigated, which was good _and _bad.

"All right, well, we need to do a routine survey of your ship camera's records, please. Someone broke into the big western factory a few hours ago, we're just doing checks. We think it was those damn Fletchers, it's the kind of stupid useless prank they like to pull."

She froze. Rather ridiculously, she wondered if _she _were a Fletcher now, if that underground shadowy rebellion that everyone was afraid of but nobody ever saw would welcome her into the fold. "Uh-"

His eyes narrowed, and then he looked her up and down, not lasciviously, but obviously taking note of the thick layers she was wearing, and- damnit- the dampness on the cuffs of her pants. _Oh, hell, _she thought, fists curling, and then, fatalistically, _This is not going to end well, encouraging words from my radical dead mother's journal aside. I messed up. I went too far_. And why had she done this stupid, stupid thing? Because she'd been irritated, because she'd wanted to, because- it felt better to do little things than nothing, even though deep down she knew her little things were hardly anything at all, and wasn't that sort of self-delusion part of the goddamn problem?

"Is there a problem?" the official prompted, and she let out the breath she'd been holding without noticing. She didn't miss the subtle shift in his weight as he pushed his coat back from his blaster.

"No sir," she said sweetly, wishing she could spit poison at him from between her clenched teeth. "I'm just surprised. I was in Junction City not a month ago, and the Fletcher problem _there_ didn't surprise me, but here? I guess I wasn't expecting those morons to bring their filth to a new colony."

He relaxed, just slightly, but he wasn't stupid enough to turn around and leave. "Well, they're persistent. Like cockroaches. Did you see any of the tax protesters? Last news we got from Junction City, the strikes were still going on, it made getting new workers here real difficult."

"Mm," she said noncommittally, wishing her mouth weren't quite so dry, that she could go back in time, or maybe that she could shut the door in this guy's face. "I don't like to go too far into the city."

"Don't blame you, miss, there's only so much order the law can keep in a place with so many people." He offered a conciliatory smile, and she began to feel rather bad.

Well, almost. "So did you have to see our records right now?" she tried, yawning again. "It's just I've got no idea how that stuff works and my mechanic's dead asleep..." Her hope practically gagged her.

"Unfortunately, yes, it's got to be now. The docks are on lockdown until we go through every ship. Sorry, miss, but it's Imperium orders. They want to send a message to whoever broke into the factory."

She had her mouth open to respond when she heard footsteps on the catwalk, and there was Soul, mussed and squinting blearily down at them. Hopefully he'd done a little lurking and listening before making his appearance. "Heyyy," she said sheepishly. "There's, um… a thing…"

He shot her an exasperated glance- no, scratch that, he was _furious-_ and dropped down to stand beside her, offering the Imperium official a nod. "You need our ship recordings? Buddy, that's really going to cut into my sleeping time," he said grumpily, somehow managing to loom darkly despite being a solid handspan shorter than the other man.

"Sorry. Can't help it." The official was giving them that narrow look again, obviously growing suspicious at their waffling, and Maka stuck her hands inside her coat pockets to discreetly dry her sweaty palms, and also to get a good grip on her own blaster.

Soul grunted. "Fine, whatever, let's get it over with. You'd think the damn factory would have security cams of their own."

She was a little offended he thought she'd just wander around with her face uncovered, really, but anyway modern cameras were so small that she hadn't been able to tell for sure if there were any. "They do, but they're outdated, they don't record right half the time," the man said shortly, already walking past them. Maka took the opportunity to close the door behind him.

Soul raised his brows at her, looking beyond angry. "This is your fuckup," he said with dangerous softness as the man began climbing the steps to the catwalk. "And they might have you on film. Take care of it. I'll get us ready to leave."

Things were shifting in her head, ever so slowly, and she stared at him, frightened, suddenly all too aware of her own hitching breath. He tilted his head, red eyes wide, pupils dilated and gleaming like an animal's at night in the glowstrips' blue shine, and suddenly he seemed like a stranger, or perhaps she didn't quite recognize herself anymore. "I- but I don't- we'll be put on their watchlist, and-"

"Are you going to show me your films or do you want me to wander around in the dark?" the official demanded waspishly, apparently at the limit of his politeness.

Soul hissed quietly and whispered, "Take care of it. I'll have us in the air in five minutes."

"How-?"

"Heard you sneaking out earlier, and Liz just now was all wild-eyed," he muttered. "Got the ship ready to go, just in case, we're all fueled up."

She bit the inside of her cheek and closed her eyes, trying to regain equilibrium, trying to figure out how her stupid little game had turned sour so quickly. She'd been furious, and she'd felt stagnant, so she'd ridden the waves of her temper straight to hell without even bothering to really sit down and think about it-

Her mother would have been disappointed, probably. At least the version of her mother she'd concocted in her head would have been.

She blew out a shaky breath and smiled at the official. It felt toothy, wrong, but in her bones was nothing but liquid relief for _Soul, _who had been there always and who never failed her, who was as much a part of her as her very own heartbeat. "Sorry, here, I'll show you the way."

The official turned his back on her just long enough for her to put the butt of her blaster to good use on his skull. She pushed him well outside the cargo hold and pressed the emergency button on his radio to call for aid- he was already stirring, but head injuries were nothing to mess with, especially in a thin atmosphere- and then, even as the door scraped shut they were moving, rising straight up above a ravenous blossom of flames and silvery smoke, thundering slowly towards the dubious safety of the coldly glittering stars. Maka, already sliding around under heavy G-force, sat down on the floor and put one hand gingerly on the edge of a rust-brown stain, feeling her bones shake in time with her fleeing ship.


	4. Chapter Three

Patti was silent and furious, eyes laser-bright beneath her bangs, and Liz was a golden storm, thundering around banging the walls and screaming louder than the engines. Tsubaki was watchful, icy razor edges wrapped in poisonously polite words. Together they were judge and jury and firing squad all at once.

Maka's hands shook as she pulled up the 3-D galaxy map. "Anywhere you want," she said, feeling sick. "Anywhere you want to go, I'll take you, free of charge."

"After kidnapping us off the moon we _wanted_ to go to!" Liz spat, slicing through the map with a fist; it blurred shakily before restabilizing, and Maka stared at the tiny sapphire bubble of Old Earth, unable to speak around the lump in her throat.

_I'm always running,_ she thought. _Running towards the time when life gets easier, when I actually know what to do instead of just pretending, and I thought by the time I was this old I'd be there, but instead I'm rolling downhill through thorns._

"Sorry," she mumbled, for the twentieth time, boots scraping roughly on the metal floor as she took a step back. Black Star, lurking in the corner, shook his head.

"Sorry doesn't fucking help!" Liz was on a roll now, like lava down a mountainside, and Patti flanked her, nodding mercilessly at every word. "You- you _kidnapped _us, you just took off, and I had plans, okay? You can't just do this shit! I'll- I'll sic the law on you when we hit dirt! I paid_, _I actually _paid_ and you pull this bullshit?"

Patti said coldly, "Our mother was from Tethys. We might have family there, you stupid bitch, and if you don't turn around and take us back there's going to be trouble."

"I can't," Maka gritted, rubbing her temples and wondering if there was an upper limit for the guilt one person could feel. "I'm sorry."

"That doesn't really help us," Tsubaki asked, staring absently at the map before dragging slim fingers through a shimmering asteroid field, then stroking Mars like one would pet a cat. "You did something _very _foolish. If you were going to break the law, couldn't you have waited until we were off your ship?"

Her voice was calm, but her gaze was steely as she finally met Maka's eyes. "I wasn't intending to get caught," Maka said feebly, all too aware of how ridiculous she sounded, like a little kid with one hand in the cookie jar.

Tsubaki took a slow breath and closed her eyes, as if she were counting, or perhaps bracing herself, then she said levelly, "I think that you don't like the Imperium. I think perhaps you're even part of the Fletcher rebellion."

Damn, damn, damn. Maka nearly snarled in frustration. "That's not-"

"The guy who told us to come to you _did _say that you wouldn't really give a shit if we had real papers or not," Liz cut in, eyes narrowing. "And then you go and do this… what are we supposed to think?"

"I heard much the same," Tsubaki agreed, pinning Maka in place with a small smile that was all ice and victory. "You're not a typical smuggler, because you don't care if we wander the ship, which leaves… rebellion. That, or something from your past came back to bite you."

"Sunspots!" Maka bellowed, kicking the wall of the room with a resounding _clang_. Everyone jumped, satisfyingly, and she thumped her palms down on the map projection table. "Why the hell should I tell any of you anything? You two-" She pointed at the sisters- "You're troublemakers and I've no doubt you're wanted in Junction City for something or other, so maybe you should think of that before you try and tell me what to do on my ship! And you, little rich girl, you're running from something to, or did you think we didn't notice how _eager_ you were to get to _anywhere? _Glass houses, okay, and don't forget it!"

The silence was complete and chilling. Black Star pushed off the wall and headed for the door, looking stormy. He paused as the door slid up with a nasty grinding sound, then said over his shoulder before leaving, "You didn't do anything _wrong, _everyone knows it, you just got unlucky. They'll understand once they calm down."

Maka stood there, poleaxed, and then sat down bonelessly to put her head in her hands. "Crap. I hate when he does that 'unexpected voice of reason' thing…" she muttered.

"Okay, you know what, as pissed as I still am, I'm starting to get really curious now too," Liz said roughly. "As you so kindly pointed out, we're all in trouble of some sort, even Princess here." She jabbed Tsubaki in the shoulder. "So spill, and then maybe we can stop yelling and figure out a plan, because I really don't like not knowing where we're _going!"_

"We'll go wherever you want to go," Maka said, getting to her feet again just so she had something to do. "Soul fueled up the ship-" And where he'd gotten the money for that, she didn't know, but she had a terrible feeling that it involved the savings he'd been hoarding for the last ten years, the ones he kept in that little box marked 'To the End'- "And I did you all a wrong that needs made right. Whatever my reputation may be as a captain, I take care of my passengers, understand? I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Any colony. Or back to Junction City." She scowled at them all, feeling prickly and immature and almost despairing, then added lamely, "It's not like I shanghaied you, I'll let you go." In her head she tried vainly to move backwards, to the space of mind she'd been in when she'd snuck out, when she'd thought: _I am doing this for the colonists,_ and even: _This is the right thing to do. _Except it hadn't turned out that way at all, had it, but she still sort of thought she'd been in the right. In theory, anyway.

"You operate under a very strange set of morals, Captain," Tsubaki commented, rubbing her temples. "I don't care where we go. I picked Tethys because it seemed like a place where I could make a positive difference, but I suppose any colony could use help." How interesting. Self-imposed penance, then, but for what? She didn't walk like someone carrying weight, she moved like autumn leaves falling, but then again she was clearly very practiced at wearing a mask.

Liz squinted at the map, walking slowly around the projection table. "Patti?"

"Doesn't matter," Patti said listlessly. "We were lying to ourselves about Mom having family, anyway."

"Yeah." Liz touched a fingertip to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and after a second, a translucent window of basic information popped up with a low beep. "This place here is pretty populated, isn't it?"

"That was the fourth colony ever established, right after Junction City," Tsubaki supplied, watching Junction City's glowing dot with an odd, bittersweet curl to her mouth. "It's had a long time to get going. The days are very long, and it's cold… most of the colonists live underground. There's a large mining culture there, and fishing."

"I hate fish," Patti grunted, cheeks puffing up as if she were about to hurl.

"Okay, so that's out." Liz moved to Io next, then Orcus, rough hand combing harshly through the ephemeral lights. "This's in Kuiper territory, though, by Neptune… I dunno about living so deep in alien space."

"I like Kuipers," Patti said consideringly, brightening; the sisters looked at each other, then swung to Tsubaki, who raised her brows, looking like an ivory statue against the dark steel walls, burnished by time to beautiful, impractical angles and curves. Poor Black Star, no wonder he'd fallen so fast and quick. He'd probably never seen anything like her.

"Kuiper territory, yes, but that means a thriving trade economy and lots of ships in and out, which brings in lots of goods. Little farming, because there's not much sun, but a good export economy nonetheless. And it means a diverse population that will be easy for two wanted girls to hide in," Tsubaki told them, shrugging and then concentrating on a stray thread dangling from her moonmoth silk blouse in what was clearly 'I don't care, decide on your own'.

"Let me know when you come to a decision," Maka said quietly, and then she sat down again and put her head on her drawn-up knees, tracing the worn metal rivets bolting together the battered sheets of the flooring. She'd sat here with Soul a hundred times as a child, watching Stein and Wes plot the next trip they'd take on the projection table, marveling at the tiny, beautiful, multicolored planets spinning all around each other in the most intricate dances. How often had she woken up here with Soul's scratchy blanket draped over her and the solar system still splashing glints of artificial starlight across the walls? Once he'd zoomed in on Old Earth, until the projection table was just throwing rippling blue against the ceiling and her skin, and she'd stayed unblinking until it hurt, trying to imagine what swimming felt like, and then drowning.

"Take us to Orcus," Liz said crisply, throwing her shoulders back and jutting her chin out.

Maka roused herself and stood back up, flicking off the projection table and trying hard to crawl back inside her captain's skin. "All right. It'll take about three weeks. Do you want coldsleep? We're, uh, a little low on rations, so if you stay awake it'll be slim pickings."

"Um-" Liz hesitated and looked at Patti, who was grimacing, and then to Tsubaki.

"I'd rather be awake," Tsubaki said lightly. "Simply because there's a distinct lack of trust here now. You understand." She was tempered steel wrapped in lace, at least until she tilted her head and the light caught the remnants of baby fat still rounding her cheeks.

"Perfectly," Maka muttered, resigned to tightening her belt. "All right. I'll let Soul know. Orcus it is."

* * *

><p><em>Someone was singing- for a moment, drugged by lingering sleep, Maka thought it was her mother, but then, with a feeling like stepping onto the floor when expecting another stair, she remembered, and then she felt a bit stupid for ever thinking she remembered something she'd never really known. When she was little, she'd thought for a while that if she imagined a thing hard enough she could make it real, but she'd figured out soon enough that nothing happened, no matter how dedicated her wishing.<em>

_It was Soul and Wes she was hearing, talking outside her room in the passageway, their conversation echoing oddly from the metal. She blinked gritty lids, then squeezed her eyes closed more tightly, shoving her arms under her lumpy pillow and concentrating on trying to distinguish the two voices._

_It was useless until Soul, making the high waterfall sound she knew was laughter, said her name in the middle of his song._

_That made Wes angry- she knew because his singing got fast and low, like a growl, or drumbeats far away, and then he hissed something and left with heavy footsteps. She felt her skin goosebump for no reason at all, felt her backbone tighten almost painfully, and she turned over to face the door, curling tight around herself, pulling the sheet away from her ears._

_Soul came in then, closing the door very softly and creeping to stand by her bed. "For an alien you're very loud," she said after a moment._

_A faint huff of laughter that was more a breath than anything, and, "Are aliens supposed to be quiet?" he wondered, in that lilting tone that curled around her veins and arched her spine with tender shivers._

_She sighed and imagined her skin turning to glass, transparent, no lies, no worrying, no hunger because they had to buy fuel instead of food. "Probably. Humans are really loud, anyway."_

"_You'd better decide soon if I'm an alien or a human." He slid a hand over her arm, melting glass to dripping heat, and she opened her eyes finally, watching his milk-gold skin and milk-pale hair gleaming in the indistinct light of her battered old glowstrips. _

"_I don't care," she told him, flicking back the corner of her sheets and hoping she'd finally gotten control over her blushing. He grinned, ears working beneath his hair._

"_Apparently. I wish I'd realized what low standards you have years ago," he snorted, slipping in beside her and spanning her waist with one warm, large hand._

_She stared at him, irritatingly aware of her own flushed face, but then this was all new territory, as much as they both wanted to pretend to be adult and suave and unaffected- then again, he was flushing too, and his ears were still edging up and down, so maybe it was okay. "I take offense to that. On your behalf."_

"_You can't take offense for someone, for something _they _said," he informed her, eyes flicking down to her lips, and then lower, as he edged the sheets away; she let out a slow breath as she felt the hem drag across her nipple, even through her shirt._

"_Yes you can. I just did."_

_He burbled something and pushed her bangs back from her face. "You contrary woman." _

_She reminded herself that she was the youngest captain to run a ship in a century, that she was brave and not at all afraid- still afraid, always afraid- of the cold eternity their ship was drifting in, and she slipped her arms around his neck, digging her nails into the bumps of his spine, then running them up into his hair. "So? I think you like it."_

"_Very Captain-y," he muttered, planting a hand on the bed by her neck and leaning over, tracing his tongue whisper-soft over her ear. "I do like it."_

_She liked it too, come to think of it. She liked everything right now, from the press of his bony knee against her thigh to the agonizing, tingly drag of his fingertips up the curve where her hips met her ribs. "Sing to me." She turned in his arms, nudging him atop her with her knees, and watched his stomach flex tight as she slid a thumbnail down his chest. _

_He retaliated by licking slowly across the top of her breast, tugging her shirt down to get at it until she could hear the cheap fabric begging for mercy. His tongue was hot and wet, and she could feel the trails he left on her skin drying cool as he moved on. For a second, she could swear he was tracing words into her skin. "About what?" he breathed._

"_About… about what home is like." She shoved him up for just a moment, then wriggled out of her shirt, a bit awkwardly and very glad when it was off and she hadn't elbowed him in the face like last time._

_He was silent for a while, fingers playing thoughtfully over her ribs, breathing softly from a slightly open mouth that was astonishingly impossible to look away from. "I can't sing about that."_

_She arched up when he ran a finger across one hard nipple, clinging to him with all four limbs, trying to drag him down onto her, into her, already wanting. She'd implode like a dying star if he didn't _touch _her. "Sing something, then." She was irritated by how her voice sounded, rough and _needy_, but then she caught the way Soul closed his eyes and caught his lip between his sharp teeth. "Soul?"_

_He smiled, then frowned again, humming under his breath for a moment. "Home is people," he said, flaying her and stitching her together with threads of gold all in three little words, and then his mouth was burning against her neck as he slipped into his own language, high and liquid when she rocked her hips up against his, deep and harsh when he was inside her, and then falling into a desperate repetition that she thought might have been 'please'. Maka closed her eyes and grabbed him by the wrist, shoving his hand between her legs; he fumbled for a moment before licking his fingers sloppily and diving back in, much more successfully. She rode the dark, molten waves as they came higher and faster, breath hitching in time with Soul's, one hand gripping his shoulder for dear life and the other pressed lightly to his neck, his pulse beating wildly against her palm. She dug her heels into his hips, silently counting the little bruises his greedy hands would leave on her in the darkness, already waiting for the morning, when she could smile at them before hiding them under her clothes, just for her. His skin was hot and smooth beneath her tongue, firm beneath her teeth, and it felt like falling through the atmosphere of a new planet, the same shuddering, thrumming rhythm driving a thousand cracks through her body, and the same impatient, edgy, nearly frantic waiting._

_He was a pilot for a reason, and she whimpered when he took the ground right out from under her and sent her flying, blinded, hot all over, hips snapping up brokenly, a single whine coming from between clenched teeth as she threw her head back and shook. It was almost lost under their heavy breathing, but he heard it and voiced his approval, kept singing to her as he thrust._

_She hung on, eyes closed, trying to remember everything about the way he felt and sounded and moved, and she felt irrationally like she might cry when he slowed to a finish with a shaky snarl and melted against her. She put her arms around him carefully, felt his breath damp and fast against her sweaty neck, and for a moment she was so grateful that she felt like bursting. In her head, she went: _I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm so happy, _and then she grinned into his hair like an idiot before closing her teeth on his ear for a second, nibbling gleefully._

_He pushed up after a moment with a hand on either side of her head, kicking his leg violently until his shorts flew off the ankle they'd apparently been left on, and looked down at her, red in the face but all together looking pretty pleased._

_She scowled when his eyes drifted down to her bare breasts, raised a hand to smack him for no reason, but then he looked her in the eyes and wound a hand in her hair like he wanted to hold her still, so she didn't move. He looked at her carefully, a little wrinkle just visible between his brows, and she could see the glowstrips' light gleaming off just the faintest edge of a sharp tooth. _

"_Sometimes I think, what if you'd never found us?" he said at last, face working as if he were trying to either smile or scream._

_She scooted over, then pulled him down beside her, yanking when he didn't move fast enough, and put the sheets over their heads until they were drowning in a vague blue void. "If you stay really, really still," she told him, putting a hand to his chest, over his heart, "You can feel the ship."_

_He exhaled, like he was going to say something, but then he swallowed and slowed his breathing. She put her palms against his eyes, feeling his lashes tickle, and when he found it, when he noticed what he'd heard for years, the distant rumble of the engines pushing them through space, she felt his eyes open wide._

_Soul sang her to sleep to the rhythm of the engines, telling her slurred impossible stories she couldn't understand, but loved, and hours later, when they walked out of her room together, Stein was there, his false eye whirling from orange to yellow, hunched and menacing in his tattered coat._

_He didn't linger. He just snapped, "The western colony on Europa's been cut off. No rations in or out, Imperium orders. Apparently they fought a little too hard against whatever embezzling, drooling idiot the Council tried to place as their governor. We're going to bring them food."_

_Maka and Soul blinked at him, then each other. "But that's a war zone," Soul said at last, even though there was already resignation in the slump of his shoulders- he, a naturally introspective, cautious person, had tried and failed to be the voice of reason often enough to know what was coming. Maka watched him swallow and then looked away, all the bubbly bliss gone and replaced by murky guilt, confusion, fear. "I mean, technically, isn't it? We could get- shot down, or something," Soul added._

_Stein snorted, rubbing his hand over the stump of his wrist. "No, we won't. We'll tell them that our radio broke mid-flight and we had no idea."_

_Soul grunted, fingers flexing slightly against Maka's waist, and she released her next breath just a little too fast. "You broke the radio, didn't you. You know I've got no idea how to fix that, right?"_

"_Just go change our heading," Stein spat. "We're picking up a load of goods for the colonists on Ganymede, I put the coordinates on the screen for you."_

_Soul actually growled. "Wes is all right with this?"_

"_Wes doesn't run this ship," Stein said firmly, and Maka felt Soul's hand tighten again, then fall away as he turned towards the cockpit with a musical grumble._

"_Stein," she said, once they were alone, "You know I would have said yes to this. If you asked." Sunspots and stellar winds, but she hated this weird new dynamic between them since she registered as captain, the way she tried to make decisions but always ended on an upwards-pitched question mark because she was so used to following his lead._

_He looked off over her head, rubbing one temple hard, like he was trying to itch his brain. "I know you would have, Maka, you'd have jumped on it just as fast as I did." She preened a little at that, enjoying the warmth in his voice. "But this way it's not your call."_

_That popped her bubble quite effectively. "I want to- help, you know that, the same as my mom did," she said, trying very carefully to organize the words while they were still in her throat, and Stein did her the courtesy of listening with just as much care. "I'm old enough now to know. I've seen the things Imperium does to don't have to worry- I mean, I know that you help people who need it." Before she could stop them, her eyes went to the faint muddy stains still visible on the arms and shoulder of his lab coat, the ones she hadn't known how to wash out. He'd told her he'd gotten in a fight, but she knew, because she'd heard the ringing blast like a needle in her ears, and seen Imperium soldiers in shining blue armor dragging away the man who'd been trying to buy illegal passage off the planet, the man Stein hadn't been able to save._

"_They already have the _Razor's Edge _on their watch lists, most like," he said, putting a heavy hand- his real one- on her shoulder. Oddly enough, it helped somewhat._

_Once she'd gotten control of her breathing, she said, "Thank you, but next time, trust me to make the right decision. I'll do you proud."_

"_I raised you right," Stein said, looking bemused and slightly startled by the very thought. "What do you know about that."_

* * *

><p>"So what, now you don't think you want to stay?" Black Star snapped, across the hold and tightening a screw in the wall aggressively. Soul felt his ears pull up just at the sheer irritation in the boy's voice.<p>

Tsubaki sighed very quietly, ran a hand through the end of her glossy hair, then said, "But I thought you _wanted _me to stay." There was a sort of stubborn, hunting look on her face- it reminded Soul of Maka's infamous fifteenth birthday. It made him taste flambéed banana on the back of his tongue, in what was either a traumatic flashback or a result of the head damage he'd incurred during that particular disaster; he silently tried to urge Black Star to run.

"Not- well, I-" Black Star ended on a sour grunt, attempted to bore holes in Tsubaki's head with the sheer force of his glare, then threw his pliers against the wall with a clang that shook Soul's brain and said, "It's just you better make up your damn mind already, okay, if you want to try and talk to Captain about keeping you on, and you better figure out a reason she should _pay _you, because we don't just fly strays-"

"She flies _you_ around," Tsubaki shot back saucily, brows drawing together, and Black Star's jaw dropped. She turned on her heel and stomped one and a half steps away before stopping and turning back. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that, that was mean, I'm just frustrated that I can't find anywhere I can do some good, to make up for- well, you know. And I don't freeload, so don't worry."

It got funny after that, as Black Star, flustered by her apology and the hand she'd put on his arm, started to make vaguely chicken-ish noises in between spinning a gigantic wrench and mentioning something inane about righty-tighty, lefty-loosey that had Tsubaki looking politely perplexed. Soul snickered under his breath and angled his head towards the other side of the cargo hold, picking up the voices of Maka and Stein, standing in the black fishnet shadows beneath the catwalk grate, their faces lit like monster masks from the glowstrips running by their shoulders.

"-taking Patti and Liz to find a place to live for a bit, now we're finally here after twenty years-" she was saying.

"Don't exaggerate," Stein told her mildly.

"-_years_, and we'll pick up what rations we can, maybe do a little work on the docks for a few days and then-"

"Or we could go to the Imperium offices and get the advance pay for the terraforming job I signed us up for-"

"-Didn't _ask me_ about that, Stein, and have you heard the term 'mutiny'?"

"You told me to find us one!"

"Well, yes, but I didn't think you'd… I was hoping for something small and quick, a year or two in the field so we can get a paycheck, get back on our feet and get a bit of _reputation _back! Not _this_!"

"-Ridiculous, and it's a peach of a job, exactly what you've always wanted, you'd be stupid to turn it down, Imperium or not-"

"-Have morals, thank you very much, and I refuse to contribute to their unjust, greedy-"

"-We both know you'll take it and like it so why not just skip the argument," Stein concluded, cocking his head and shaking it a few times as if something was inside his ear, and Maka stomped her foot.

"Fine," she said ill-temperedly; Soul smirked when Stein muttered something and backed away, false eye spinning to electric blue as he put his hands up defensively. "You radio them for the specs and the advance, I refuse," Maka called, and Stein scoffed even as he thudded up the steps to the communications room, lab coat flying.

Soul sidled over to Maka on the pretext of carrying one of the big plastic cartons they'd dug up to fill with odds and ends they could pawn now that they'd hit dirt to drop the girls off, _finally_, after that irredeemably stupid fuck-up at Tethys. He still couldn't believe Maka had pulled that sort of stunt- it was one thing to sneak unregistered colonists where they needed to go, or giving a few illegally enhanced seeds to hungry folk, but actively breaking into Imperium property…

Well, it was unbelievable, and it was moronic, and thinking about it, feeling the same sick fear that had twisted his stomach when Liz had burst in to tell him there was trouble, put him in a bit of a bad mood by the time he got to her. So he dropped the plastic container on her foot and said, "Oops, sorry."

She actually hissed up at him, eyes narrowing to acid-green glints, just as if he was being a brat for no reason instead of being legitimately pissed at the incredible risk she'd taken. He glared right back, feeling his shoulders snap tight enough that anyone watching would wonder what was wrong, though over the clamor coming in from the bustling docks outside, nobody would be able to eavesdrop like he'd been doing.

Her look changed from shamed and angry to something like loneliness. "What? What is it? Hasn't the silent treatment been enough punishment for me? And that's very mature, by the way-"

"No, your punishment was being denied the cookies I made for everyone else," he snapped, watching angry red spread across her cheeks like spilled wine. "And it wasn't the silent treatment, it was you refusing to talk to me, which I _know _is because you're upset and embarrassed and you don't like people knowing when you've made a mistake, but that's no excuse. We need to figure out if there's an alert out for you, if they put a warrant on the ship that just hasn't caught up with us yet-"

"You big dumb mama hen," she said, very unexpectedly, softening so abruptly that it was like granite crumbling into sugar; Soul blinked at her warily.

"Mama… hen?" Vaguely familiar, but the bells it was ringing weren't saying anything beyond something about chickens, which led him to Black Star, which-

"It's a… a saying," she told him, faking exasperation halfheartedly and ruining it with those incredibly lethal liquid eyes. "Means you're being, uh, protective. Worrying? Cute or something."

"I already know I'm cute. You tell me frequently and at the top of your voice on certain occasions-"

"I don't call you _cute _then, I call you, well, you-" She still blushed like a girl. Soul acknowledged some mild, infatuated lightheadedness. "Dammit. Listen, I am sorry. You're right. And I'm sorry I've been difficult." The flush was replaced by paleness, but then it wouldn't be entirely incredible for Maka to actually faint from the indignity of having made the wrong choice. "So I- I shouldn't have gone about that the way I did. I should have planned, and been careful, and I put the ship at risk," she went on, trying hard to turn her guilty look into a scowl.

"Don't do it again," he told her, and his tone came out much more serious than he'd been aiming for. He couldn't help it, though, his dial was malfunctioning and stuck on 'worry'.

She looked away. "Okay."

He studied her carefully. "You mean, you'll try."

She shifted her gaze from nothing to his throat, lids dropping just a fraction, hands clasped in front of her. "The Imperium. They killed my parents without a trial. I think… I mean, how many other kids have lost their parents? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's corrupt. The system's failing, _has_ failed."

Soul's mouth went dry. Maka couldn't walk away from that, never, she'd always been incapable of turning her face away from the dark things. He probably should thank that part of her, really, because she put up with _him _and his stupid creepy teeth and his penchant for sleepwalking and singing to himself at inappropriate times and waking up in a cold sweat from nightmares about how blue his mother's lips had been before she died-

"Soul," she said quietly, and he twitched.

"Sorry. I know, I know," he mumbled. She lifted her pale blue-lit face to him like a flower to the sun, and her eyes were thankful for his understanding while her tense twisted mouth was ready for a fight.

Not with him, though, he knew. "I feel like I'm always being chased, and now I really might be," she confessed, eyes darting to the door of the hold for just a second.

"You _have_ always been chased," he told her honestly, pride and pain mingling nauseatingly in his stomach. "You can run, but the people on this ship always seem to get the fastest demons. I'm beginning to think it's bad luck. And the new _name_ doesn't help, we're literally a flying target..."

She smacked her forehead. "I didn't even _think _of that!"

* * *

><p>"They're watchin' us," Liz said nervously, swallowing audibly, one hand shifting and white-knuckled on her own upper arm.<p>

"That's their job," Soul soothed, angling his head back at the blue-armored guards as the crew strode past, ears straining. Over the clamoring crowds around them, he managed to catch only a few mumbled words, but among them was both 'Tethys' and 'Razor' which was enough for his heart to sink. He thumped Liz reassuringly on the shoulder and lengthened his steps to catch up with Maka, heading up the _Bullseye's_ little gaggle of crew and passengers with a warlike set to her jaw and a foreboding extra _thunk_ as her heels sank into the muddy red ground over ten thousand other footprints. The Orcus moon colony was so bustling it practically shook.

"Captain," he said, spinning to dodge someone's stray child who was making a break for it with gleaming eyes and an armful of stolen candy. "Pretty sure something's gonna happen. Maybe not now, but if we take a step out of line again, they'll be on us. They were talking…"

"Okay," she interrupted, face screwing up in thought. "We'll get the girls a place and get out of here quick as we can, after we pick up our advance pay for the next terraforming job." She still didn't look entirely happy about that, and she cast Stein a sideways glance like maybe she wanted to trip him. "Oh, and I wanted your opinion on something, Tsubaki wants-"

"-To tag along and make herself useful?" Soul supplied, grinning.

Maka's lips curled just a little. "You and your damn bat hearing. I love it. So? I tried to look scary when she asked and told her I'd think about it." She snuck a peek back over her shoulder at Tsubaki, and Soul did the same; sure enough, Tsubaki was eyeing Maka's back with a hopeful yet nauseated expression, and Black Star was very tellingly looking anywhere _but _at his Captain. In fact he seemed to be staring only at Tsubaki, to the dangerous exclusion of everything else around him including where he was putting his feet.

"Ha," Maka said, muffling a laugh behind one hand as Black Star fell flat on his face in the mud. Two people each carrying an armful of goods stepped right over him before he peeled himself up with a hideous sucking sound, face scarlet and clashing unattractively with his hair. Maka wheezed a few times, sounded like she might die and had to face forward again, snickering. "Oh, god, do you remember when his voice started breaking?"

"Hey," Soul protested, feeling fraternal. "That's a traumatic time for us men. Don't tease."

"Right, right, I forgot the massively fragile ego thing," she mused aloud, nodding solemnly at him, eyes glinting. "Anyway, he was all up for the terraforming job Stein got us. I told him of course we'd be resupplying once or twice a year and he could leave if he wanted, but he swore up and down he'd stick by us."

"Huh. Well, if the girl's up for it, another hand couldn't hurt, and it'll make Black Star easier to bear," Soul said wryly.

"I'll tell her yes, then." Maka frowned. "Maybe she'll tell me what ever it is she's been plotting."

"Plotting?"

Maka grimaced. "She… I saw her exchange this _look_ with someone on Tethys."

"A look."

"Yes, a look. A significant look."

"Hmm." Soul considered that, chewing on his lower lip. "Well, I'll keep an ear out."

"Keep both out, please."

"Excuse me! One of my ears is like five of yours, thank you," he said, mock-offended, throwing in a few dramatic staggering steps and clutching at his chest. Maka closed her eyes and shook her head. "You're smiling," he told her. "That face doesn't work when you're smiling."

"Right, right. Oh- hang on, we're here." Two seconds ago he'd have happily stopped slogging through the mud and called those words 'very good indeed' but now, staring at the colonist welcoming center, he was rethinking that really quickly, and judging by the sharp dismayed inhalation he caught from Patti behind him, he wasn't alone.

They went inside, though, wiping their feet as best they could, and things improved. The inside was much nicer than the outside, Patti and Liz were practically jumping up and down, and there was even a mostly-defunct bot held together with zipties and what seemed to be copious amounts of chewing gum; the repairs didn't inhibit its ability to serve coffee at all, thankfully, and Soul had three cups before Maka caught him and cut him off.

After that he sulked in the corner on a hoverchair that was about two inches too far off the ground for comfort, watching Maka slurp what _would_ have been his fourth cup and listening to Patti and Liz grow steadily happier.

Finally, laughing, Maka brushed Liz's bangs out of her face and asked, "What exactly are you so happy about?"

It sounded a little discouraging at first, maybe, or like she was calling them naive or something, but Liz stood up straight and understood immediately. "We're free here," she said to Maka, beaming brighter than an Imperium searchlight in the middle of the night. "Blank slate and such."

"Nice, isn't it?" Maka said, and Soul knew that he was the only one who caught the edge of wistfulness to her tone.

She was standing there in the middle of the room, patting the serverbot absently on the head, covered to her ankles in clinging mud, one pigtail just slightly crooked, and he put a foot on the ground to stand up and go to her when one of the folks volunteering at the center began to cough.

It was the kind of wet cough that spoke of aching, drowning lungs and long nights lying awake, hacking until every muscle hurt. When the woman pulled her face out of her hands, she looked into them with a sort of blank terror, and even though Soul couldn't see, he knew she'd spat up blood, because he'd heard that same cough in ten other colonies whose atmospheres hadn't been properly prepared for colonists. He pulled his foot back up and said loudly, in a fog of rage, "How many people here are sick?"

One of the other volunteers grunted, and a third, a freckled teenage girl who'd been lounging in a corner repairing what looked like some sort of farming contraption, said coolly, "Lots. We all know we won't live past sixty. Tradeoff's that we get to live way out here, less soldiers, higher taxes on our goods but better returns."

"And you're free," Liz said, eyes narrowed and looking appropriately fierce.

The girl snorted, with difficulty, because she seemed to be chewing tobacco. "Accordin' to Imp scum, everyone's free in the universe, you know? They just don't care what our _free_ lungs breathe as long as we keep shippin' food out to fill their pig mouths while they sit on ninety-nine percent of all the money in all the planets." Then she shoved her nose back into the gears she had spread out on the floor and shut up.

Maka was staring at the girl like she'd just caught spontaneously on fire, even as the rest of the room blanched and stared at the ceiling, but then she shook herself and started saying soothing things to Liz and Patti. It all dissolved far too quickly into girly tears, and Tsubaki wept over the sisters like a true damsel in distress, delicately red eyes and lashes glittering with tiny tears, the whole nine yards.

Black Star and Stein were more composed, saying their farewells with manly handshakes. In Stein's case it was more a creepy examination of the vein's on Patti's wrist, but whatever. In the end, not without a surprising and heavy sadness lying sodden in his chest, Soul got Maka and the rest headed back to the ship, while their erstwhile passengers stayed behind to begin discovering their new home. His last glimpse of them was two golden heads bowed together, and two pairs of brave shoulders held determinedly square.

Tsubaki followed the crew like a lost little puppy, and Maka didn't say anything. She did lean in close, just as they were trying to scrape mud off their feet in preparation for the ten-minute elevator ride to the top floor of the docks where the _Bullseye_ was parked, and breathe, "Did you see that girl's arrow tattoo?"

He straightened up so fast his spine cracked audibly. "No I didn't," he said, earning an odd look even from Black Star, who was still giving Tsubaki googly-eyes.

Maka smiled mysteriously, and out of long experience, Soul snuck out of her bed later that night to go to the cockpit and check the cargo manifest. He pulled the list up in front of him, glowing blue text making him squint, and sure enough-

"It's only two," Maka said from behind him. He sighed and craned his neck around the back of his flight chair to eyeball her sternly. "It's only two," she repeated. "Two filter masks."

"And the blueprints for making _more _masks that you picked up somehow on our last trip to the lunar colony," he mused, raising a brow at her.

Caught, she laughed, and then she came over to sit on his lap and push her face into the crook of his neck. "Well, you know, just in case. Those masks only last a few years."

"How do you think they're doin'?" he wondered, sliding a hand beneath the hem of her ragged sleep shirt, which looked suspiciously familiar. Her bare thigh was smooth and warm, and her breath was hot and damp on his neck.

"Patti and Liz? Good. Those two are like weeds," she predicted sleepily, curling closer. "They can survive anywhere. They're real good girls. I sort of miss them. A lot, actually. It's nice to have a full ship."

"Me too," he admitted, dipping to press a kiss to her shoulder through a hole in her shirt, then leaning further forward to switch off the cargo list. That left them lit only by the dim shine of the mint-green data readouts of the dashboard. "Wonder what they were running from."

Maka hummed. "Iunno," she mumbled, and Soul picked her up with a sigh.

"_Giving_ away masks that are worth a kidney," he grumbled under his breath, pushing the button to the cockpit door with his hip and side-stepping carefully through to avoid banging her feet on the wall. "Some captain you are. You're a damn soft touch, you know that?"

"I was being a hero," she protested between squeaky little yawns. "A good person. I was being loud."

"Sure, sure."

"I was." That was very close to a whine; her eyelids were flickering as she tried hard and failed to keep them open.

"Go back to sleep, honey, I'm glad you gave them the masks," he told her, trying desperately to key in the code to open her quarters with the single finger he could manage to use without dropping her. She grunted and wound her arms tighter around his neck, but she didn't make a sound when he finally got her back beneath the shabby covers and slid in bed beside her. He told her he loved her to the end in his first language, a soft susurration of melodic breath in her ear, and she whispered it back immediately in her own.


	5. Chapter Four

Wes's left hand was doing that nervous tap-tap-tap thing against his bunk again, and it was driving Kid slowly and painfully _insane_, but he managed to keep his mouth shut by dint of willpower he didn't know he had and some subtle but literal tongue-biting.

Eventually Wes got tired of staring up at their cabin's holographic ceiling- currently displaying some unrealistically fluffy white clouds skidding hypnotically against a dreamy blue sky, because Imperium believed that calm soldiers were obedient soldiers- and said, "So how'd your first week back in Junction go, Kidlet?"

"I hate that nickname," Kid said immediately, irritated. Damn it all, he was a forty-something man now and 'Kidlet' was just _not _acceptable in any way, shape, or form. "And it went as well as could be expected, I suppose. It's just… new, that's all." One hand crept up to press gingerly against the unfamiliar dark stubble on his skull, then to brush against the softer white hair that grew over the scars raking back from his temple- life in an underfunded, overcrowded Imperium orphanage wasn't always easy, to put it mildly. Anyway, he'd spent his thirties stationed on a tiny backwater Venusian moon, quite happily guarding the growing colony there, and nobody had given a shit if his hair didn't meet regulations, but now he'd been recalled to deal with the Fletcher rebellion and there went his hair.

"Sorry, sorry," Wes said, still tap-tapping away like it was his life's mission. His own hair was just as short as Kid's, but it was pale, which made his large ears stick out a bit in contrast, and when he turned to glance at Kid, his eyes were so dark that he looked like a skull. The constant clenching of his jaw didn't help matters either- he'd told Kid once, years ago when they'd been rookie recruits trying desperately to survive boot camp, that it hurt him often after some sort of surgery gone wrong- but then he smiled, revealing white, even teeth, with that startling charm he sometimes showed. "So, really. How'd it go?"

Kid reflected on that for a long moment. "Er," he said, and then, prodded to seriousness by Wes's intent face and the nagging guilt of knowing he hadn't written Wes even once while stationed on the tiny moon, "Well. It's sort of- it seems like everyone's our enemy, or _about _to be our enemy. More than usual, that is, they're really ramping up all the 'save humanity by giving a limb' propaganda." Wes snorted dryly. "But we don't have any allies, it's just the government against the people. And the people who _should_ be our allies, the ones I wanted to help when I enlisted… they're our enemies too."

Wes gave him a very familiar, scrutinizing look; he had a way of picking one's brain without them ever noticing. "You're talking about the rebellion. The Fletchers."

"...Yes."

"It's all a bunch of bullshit, huh?" Wes said understandingly. The tap-tap grew faster, louder. "I was all big eyes and shining armor and saving the universe when I signed up too, man, it's a rude awakening when you figure out that we're pretty much the last barrier between humanity and bloody chaos."

Well, that was dramatic. Kid offered a smile, bit back his instinctive comment about the outstanding mid-life crisis Wes was apparently going through, and looked back up at the ceiling. "Yes, it's definitely…. bullshit.,"

"Yeah. You'll get used to it again, though." Wes, who was so rabidly supportive of the Imperium that he probably had their logo tattooed on his ass, looked just a little smug; Kid retaliated by stretching his full six-foot-one out with a yawn and letting his feet hang off the end of his bunk. Five-six Wes narrowed his eyes, and the tapping got even louder. "They tell you where you'll be stationed yet?"

"No idea," Kid said, shrugging and then wincing as his sore muscles whined. Getting back into proper soldier shape was painful. "I applied for a post here in Junction City, but I don't know if I'll get it yet." Junction City _was_ the place where the Fletchers seemed to be doing the most damage. Last week they'd stolen a hovertank and driven it straight into an army ship, the week before that they'd staged a riot involving creatively profane fireworks during one of the Imperium Council member's public speeches, and yesterday they'd somehow spread a rumor about fungus in Imperium flour. Army sales had ground to a halt and the few small farmers still kicking about were making more money off their 'pure' flour than they'd probably seen in their lifetimes.

"Don't wanna go back to any of the outer planets, huh?" Wes said. "Don't blame you, it's hard to get assigned to a pace that's half Fletcher. Those jackasses are a pain in the ass everywhere, but it's worse on the moons. They know it takes time for our ships to get there, the bastards."

"You been to any of the colonies that are rebelling?" Kid asked, intrigued; he'd never in a million years admit it out loud, but now that he was here, he very much wanted to stay in the city he'd been raised in, rather than be forced back onto a planet where the mere sight of blue armor could provoke all kinds of problems. Even if he _could _grow his hair beyond regulations.

"Two. Tethys and Orcus, actually," Wes answered.

"What were they like?"

Wes hesitated, stopped tapping, then made a funny sort of rumble deep in the back of this throat, eyes tracking across the false clouds. "Well," he said slowly. "Lot of good people there. Colonists all work hard, and the colonies themselves are growing, just… slowly. It's just going to take time. Those outer moons, it's like stepping back in time going there."

"Huh," Kid said, for lack of anything else to say, and then he sat up and reached under his bed to pull out his pocket laserblade and the little chunk of oak he'd been carving on for the past few days.

"What're you making this time?" said Wes, watching as Kid deftly flicked a curl of white wood into the disposal tube by the beds.

The tube made a hungry whoosh as it sucked down the scrap. "A sphere."

"A… a what?" said Wes, and for a moment he looked oddly nervous.

"A circle. A perfect, um, round… I want to try and get it perfect," Kid said, hoping he wasn't flushing. It had sounded much less strange in his head, but he'd bought the chunk of real oak- paid through the nose for it, in fact, with money he didn't really have to spend- and it had been so lovely, the grain patterned like the tangled vapor trails filling the skies over Junction City at rush hour, that he'd felt a burning need to pare it all down to the purest essence.

Wes just made a humming sound. "Mm. Neat."

"Speaking of the colonies," Kid said, vaguely uncomfortable again as he often was around handsome, charismatic, veteran Wes and wanting to fill the silence. "Did you hear about the terraforming school that's opening on Tethys?"

"Really?" said Wes, eyebrows shooting up. "Huh. I mean, there's only one college on the whole moon, how are they gonna find people smart enough to learn to 'form?"

"No idea," Kid said, shrugging. "But someone was talking about it. I guess they want to work on, um, it's a new microbe they're modifying to speed up atmospheric purification. Eats certain elements. I heard some guy, Stan or Stein or something, was working on it a few decades back before he disappeared, and the last of his research got left on Tethys. Must have really been something there worth funding, you know?"

Wes made that humming noise again, sounding a bit like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "Interesting," he said, sounding as if it were quite the opposite, and Kid swallowed and fell quiet, breathing the sweet smoke as his laserblade burned through the oak. "You asked me once why I joined the army," Wes said after a long time, starting up his tapping again; for a moment, irrationally, Kid thought there was a bird in the room, but it was only Wes. "Well, I was tired of everyone giving me shit for the way I look. I needed cash, I needed a way to live..."

"The way you look- I don't understand," Kid said blankly.

Wes rubbed his jaw again, eyes narrowing at the ceiling. "It was just.. practical, I mean. To join. It was the only choice, but they talked sense, too. I believed in the Imperium. What about you?"

"I didn't really have a choice," Kid said, pausing after his next cut as his hand began to shake. How had they passed so many years together and not talked about this? But then Wes was usually private as hell. "You know, Imp orphans usually… well, I turned seventeen and they kicked me out and I didn't have anywhere else to go either, so I joined up." His heart, still not recovered, ached at the memory.

"No family?"

"None I know about." The ache receded, replaced by the sore tingle of very old scars. Kid started carving again, carefully, cautiously, because it was all too easy to take away too much but impossible to put it back. He had to work a little more slowly lately; the barracks were chilly, and it made the joints in his fingers ache. "What about you?"

Wes's teeth clicked like he'd bitten off a word at its birth. "Got a brother somewhere. That's all." There was a long moment, and the tapping reached nearly unbearable volume. "He tried to take my _ship_." There was so much vitriol in the last word it practically sizzled.

Kid put his blade and his oak down at that to goggle openly. "You had a ship of your own? Sunspots!"

"Key word '_had'_," Wes said sourly. "Anyway, it was… I mean, it was _mostly _mine. If you grow up somewhere, if you love it, if you spend years and years working like hell to keep it afloat you at least deserve a _vote _in what it's used for, don't you?"

"Er," said Kid. "Yes?"

"Exactly! So I just, well, I left but yeah, he pretty much stole the ship out from under me." Wes sounded as if he _meant _to be angry, but his astonishing voice told the truth and showed all his pain in a raw sort of way that made Kid sorry and anxious all at once. Really, Kid was beginning to wish he'd never started a conversation this deep, because it was _awkward_ hearing all this, in the same way that staring at Wes' beating heart would be. "So that's why I joined, too, I wanted to keep order. Shitty stuff happens when people don't follow the rules. People die. Anyway, the Imperium's right." Hatred laced his voice when he spoke next, hatred and loss that made Kid pick up his blade again. "Aliens aren't to be trusted. They'll play with human lives and think it _fun. _People might not like how hard Imperium laws are on them, but it's the only way. It's for the greater good. In a few generations things will be steadier and better, and people will be happy."

"Oh," Kid said, thinking about Glieseans and Kuipers, the only sentient aliens humans had discovered in all their travels, and the pair descended into near-silence again, wreathed in aromatic smoke from a tree that didn't grow anywhere in Junction City anymore except in greenhouses and parks, a tree that hadn't grown on the smouldering nuclear wreckage of Earth in hundreds of years.

It was Gliesean science that had allowed oak trees to be saved from extinction when humans fled Earth, and it was Fletcher terraformers who'd stolen saplings and smuggled them to various colonies, where the forests were reborn. Kid wondered if Wes knew that, but he didn't say it.

* * *

><p>Maka shoveled in a forkful of her brown rice- Soul had found <em>real <em>butter somewhere, bless his heart, though she wasn't sure he knew what an actual cow even looked like- swallowed, and then nearly choked as Stein said placidly to Tsubaki, "So how do you think you'll handle it working... under Black Star?"

"Under," Soul wheezed, slapping his knee and entirely ruining the joke, earning a disgruntled glare from Stein. Black Star went beet-red and clapped both hands over his mouth to suffocate his snickering.

"I think they _got it_," Stein told Soul with a pained sigh.

Tsubaki only adopted an expression of long-suffering tolerance, patted Stein on the head the way one would pet a very old, confused grandfather, and said politely, "I think I'll handle it just fine, thanks. I've got a little experience as a mechanic, you know."

"Just as long as you're willing to accept the risks," Maka put in, wagging a finger at Tsubaki with a grin.

Tsubaki, who'd heard this speech at least ten times since she'd decided she wanted to stay on the _Bullseye_, smiled just a little, which sent Black Star into what looked like mild heart palpitations. She brushed a swooping lock of glossy dark hair back behind her ear and said lightly, "You all keep telling me that, but most people would be out of their minds with happiness to get a position on crew with a nice ship like this. There aren't many big ships with private owners anymore, you know, Imperium's buying them all." That was half flattery and half true. Most people would be delighted to gain the unique freedom that came only with a ship, but most people would prefer to be traders or merchants, not terraformers who either stayed docked on one planet for years or wandered the galaxy aimlessly, and looking at Tsubaki's fresh young face was making Maka feel vaguely guilty.

But then she felt irrationally guilty all the time for having taken Black Star onboard, too, for keeping him in dubious, lonely, empty conditions, so she sighed and ate more rice.

In fact, she was so involved in her delicious buttery rice that it took her a long moment to notice Black Star's face. When she did, she thought: _Oh no, what now?_

It was subtle, because he was a very good liar when he wanted to be, but whenever he looked at Tsubaki, the skin around his green eyes tightened and his lips pressed together.

Maka knew that look. She'd seen it when he was fifteen and thought he'd gotten a girl pregnant, she'd seen it when he was ten and had accidentally dropped a _really _expensive crate of actual chicken eggs, and she'd caught him wearing it when he tried to smuggle an actual chicken onto the ship two years ago under the guise of, "It's a bird, it just flew in here by itself!" He seemed to have something of a... _fascination_ with chickens, come to think of it. Maybe Soul had called him a birdbrain too often when he was a kid.

She swallowed and kicked Soul gently under the table, pointing her eyes at Black Star meaningfully when Soul looked at her. Soul stared at Black Star from beneath his bangs for a long moment, rubbing his chin, then winced and sighed.

"Black Star," Maka said, pushing her rice away. Suddenly she wasn't hungry, and the breath in her lungs seemed thick. "Is there something you'd like to tell me?"

He stiffened. "No," he said flatly, but his ears were turning pink, a sure sign that he was lying. More telling, Tsubaki was poker-faced and chewing gently on the end of her spoon, staring at nothing.

"Spill it already," Stein commanded, looking impatient. His eye made a few clicking sounds and then swirled to sparking orange.

"Nothing to spill," Black Star said stubbornly, jaw clenching.

Tsubaki, however, took a deep breath and closed her eyes; it looked like she was counting inside her head. Then she opened them and stood, pulling the hem of her shimmering holographic-finish tunic up, revealing a sliver of pale stomach above her leather belt.

"Tsubaki!" Black Star snapped. She ignored him.

There was a red arrow tattooed on her hip, simple and stark and very obviously done by an amateur, no larger than her palm. Next to it were the frayed pink edges of a blaster burn; Tsubaki obviously wasn't the coddled rich girl she'd seemed. "I'm a Fletcher," she said, licking her lips and still avoiding everyone's eyes. The words seemed to cost her something vital. "They sent me to see if we could recruit you. You've gotten a bit of a reputation over the years."

The room exploded. Black Star snarled and flung his bowl at the wall very dramatically, where it shattered; a clump of rice stuck there for a moment before falling. Soul made an eerie yowling sound deep in his chest, like a winter storm screaming through the forest, and he stood up immediately to block the door, though Tsubaki wasn't moving. Stein stood up too, his real eye glinting just as malevolently as his artificial one, which was currently yellow and throwing a nasty jaundiced glare over all of them. Everyone was talking at once, and Tsubaki was white as moon dust, looking on the verge of tears.

"What the fuck!" Black Star hissed.

"So you knew we had a spy on our ship, and you didn't say anything," Maka said heavily to him, and everyone fell silent.

"I'm not going to turn you in or anything," Tsubaki said earnestly, with an apologetic pleading glance at Black Star, who'd collapsed back into his seat and crossed his arms, looking as pissed as Maka had ever seen him. "I like all of you. Even if you don't want to join the rebellion, that's okay, we're not going to do anything to you."

"That is _so _not the issue here!" Maka spat, jumping to her feet so fast that the backs of her knees banged against her bolted-down chair. "You already know we sympathize with your cause, or whatever, you- you know that or you wouldn't have bothered _sneaking_ onto my ship. The _point _is that you lied! You convinced my mechanic to cover for you-" She shot a venomous glare at Black Star, who looked mutinous. "You lied. We don't lie on my ship! We don't lie to each other, we're a family!" Family, the word she'd hung on her heart and her soul, the thing she'd scraped together so carefully from the corners of the stars, and suddenly it was all upside down and changing. It was a very bad feeling.

"Can we focus on me for just a moment?" Black Star interrupted, smacking his palms down on the table. "Look, I didn't mean to lie, I just wasn't sure how to tell you without you freaking out, and plus we're already on our way to the new moon to 'form it so I didn't think it _mattered_!"

"That's a good point," Soul said, squinting in thought and apparently a bit calmer, and then he tapped his watch and brought up a miniature hologram of the solar system, then zoomed in on the largest moon of Pluto, pointing at it accusingly. "We're already a quarter of the way to Charon here. Are we just supposed to turn around? Waste fuel, waste all the supplies we picked up for this job, lose the paycheck that we _really _fucking need to go play hero?"

Tsubaki opened her mouth, then closed it without saying anything, looking distressed. Finally she braced her shoulders and said staunchly, "Look, this isn't the worst thing I've done by far for the cause, and I'm sure I'll do worse. Imperium has got to fall. They disregard human rights, they're ruining human-alien relations and the economy's flatlining. Free speech is a joke. They're outright murderers, they've got no regard for their own laws or for _life_, they lie and swindle-"

"We don't need to hear the Fletcher brochure," Stein drawled, fingers rubbing together as if he was dying for a smoke. "We've experienced it all, thank you, or didn't you notice my missing _pieces_? Courtesy of Imperium blasters. They didn't _like_ us helping the colonies out from under their bootheel. We're well aware of why the Imperium's 'bad'." He finished with a scornful snort and then leaned back precariously in his chair, raising a brow expectantly at Tsubaki. One of his carnivorous vines had crept across the floor to twine tenderly around his leg, and Black Star was eyeing it sideways, clutching his spoon defensively.

"Stein," Maka said, feeling lost and nervous and not very Captain-y. "What do you think?"

"What do I think? About what, exactly?"

"About- well, do we just stop somewhere on the way and drop her off? Do we join-"

"You already know what you want to do, my dear," he said softly, closing his eyes and tapping metal fingers on the table. It made a sound like rain, and Maka realized with a sudden pang that she hadn't fallen asleep to the music of raindrops in years. She was never on the ground long enough. She'd never _settled_, she and Soul and Stein had just kept running from their pasts, all across the stars, and yet the 'happy ending' she'd been waiting for had never come. Instead things seemed only to be getting worse by the day.

"I-" She couldn't quite speak, so instead she waved a hand at Tsubaki, motioning for her to go on.

"It's dangerous," Tsubaki said, looking hopeful now, twisting and pulling the hem of her shimmering tunic between slim fingers. Between her shining shirt and the soft gleam of her trousers- black velvet woven with impossibly thin threads of beaten metal, the very latest Junction City fashion- she looked like she was wearing armor, ready to go to war, and the zeal shining like fire in her eyes only added to the impression. "It's very dangerous, but you already know that. It'll make your life hell. Imperium has as much control as they do because they don't just take care of any rebellions, they stomp them flat."

"So why aren't the Fletchers flat already, then?" Soul asked, glancing at Maka and then looking away too quickly for her to decipher his expression.

"Because we are made up of the best people the galaxy has to offer," Tsubaki said staunchly. The fire leaped higher. "We're made up of people who'll do anything to get what they know is right, and what's _right _is people being able to go where they want, say what they want, without being murdered."

"They killed my mom and dad," Maka told her. "When I was little… I inherited this ship."

Tsubaki swallowed and looked down. "I'm sorry." She did sound sincere, she sounded like she really and truly was sorry for the horrible thing that had affected Maka's entire life even though she didn't even _remember_ it, and Maka had to close her eyes for a moment.

"Soul?" she whispered at last, because as much as she loved Stein and Black Star, Soul was the person she'd always lived for, the brightest star in her sky, and his thoughts were the first she wanted to hear, in love and the desperate hope that he'd somehow be able to stabilize the ground that had dropped out from beneath her feet.

He licked his lips, then shook his head. "We still have bloodstains in our hold."

That was answer enough.

"Fine. We're with you," Maka said grimly to Tsubaki. "Soul. Go turn the ship around. We're heading back to Junction City." Soul closed his eyes briefly, then nodded and left, the heat of the palm he touched to her back lingering like a promise. "Tsubaki… there's one thing. The Fletchers send one woman to recruit, what, the four of us? That seems, um, not quite right. Risk versus reward-wise, I mean."

"True," Tsubaki admitted quietly.

Maka clenched her jaw, then blew out a tense breath and leaned a hip against the table and stared sadly at the cold remnants of Black Star's delicious, buttery rice. "You want me and my crew, but more importantly than that you want my _ship_."

Tsubaki said nothing, but she reached out a hand to the cold metal wall.

* * *

><p><em>She woke to a great rocking motion, as if the ship had landed in a wild sea. The emergency lights went off a moment later, flaring orange from every corner, and the alarm was shrill and high.<em>

_Stein burst through her door, long legs going every which way, before she could do more than sit up in bed and blink in startled confusion as her forgotten reading tablet fell off her bed and onto the floor with a dismaying cracking sound. "Get up. Get dressed. Deal with those boys!" he bellowed furiously, clinging to the doorframe as the ship rolled again with a groaning creak._

"_What? What's happening?" she screamed back, stuffing her feet into her boots and running past him in her pajamas- patterned with various constellations, a gift from Soul during the last holiday season neither of them had been in cryosleep. Most holidays were spent alone on board the _Razor's Edge.

"_That idiot Westing's trying to fly us!"_

"_What?!"_

_Stein didn't bother answering as they scrambled around another corner, the alarms still shrieking danger in their ears. He only gave her a furious look and then nearly skidded straight into the cockpit door, which was closed._

_Maka slammed her fist into the entrance button over and over, but it was locked from the inside, and as she and Stein stood there with wild eyes and heaving chests, the alarms went off and the entire ship suddenly_ stopped_._

_There was always a comforting pulse with a live ship, a thrumming subterranean vitality that came from the engines and the life support systems and the electricity, a hundred different things that meant all was well, and to have it die down, to go from buzzing to _nothing _in half a heartbeat sent Maka reeling. It felt wrong, it felt like she'd crawled out of her own skin and into a stranger's._

"_What the fuck did that idiot do!" Stein raged, kicking furiously at the door. His false eye was the only thing lighting them now, but its reddish glint was the opposite of comforting._

"_He disabled everything," Maka whispered, shivering against the wall. "It's all off. I haven't turned the ship off in years." If they hadn't been docked, if they'd been enroute somewhere, they'd be dying in increments as they breathed up the last of the oxygen, as the artificial heat slowly faded to space's incredible cold. The thought was enough to make Maka squeeze her eyes shut in horror. Two years ago they'd been hired to haul in a drifting ship, a hulk that had lost power for whatever reason, and they'd found the crew huddled together under a mountain of blankets, peaceful and mummified and dead._

_Stein looked at her grimly, likely thinking exactly what she was, then began pounding on the door again and shouting ineffectually, if creatively; Maka, used as she was to his rants, still winced. "Westing, if you don't let me in there I swear to god I'll drop you on the next asteroid I see and I won't feel badly in the slightest! I'll make you alphabetize your own damn organs and then sell you for spare parts! Hearts go for a lot, you know!"_

_The only answer from the cockpit was a muffled thump, then a crash and a furious ululation that rose and fell like a storm. "They're fighting," Maka said. "Soul's in there. It'll all be okay."_

_Stein sat down and leant his head against the wall with a quiet grimace, lifting his hand to massage his stump. Maka thought absently, watching him, that she really hoped they'd save up enough to convince some back-alley doctor to fix him a prosthetic soon, because she was sixteen and pretty damn tough even in a wild world, but watching him rub his skin raw and wince in pain from a hand that no longer existed as anything but wayward atoms was hard. "It'll be okay," she repeated, mostly to reassure herself, and then, when another thump and more arguing came from inside the cockpit, she sat down and put her head on Stein's shoulder, curling her legs to her chest. "Right?"_

"_Hope so," Stein said dispassionately. His eye whirled faster with a soft whirring sound, and it managed to make the tomb-quiet ship a little less terrifying. Maka felt, gladly, less hyper-aware of her own breath, her own heartbeat._

_It took a long time. Maka's adrenaline faded, and she was nearly asleep by the time her ship hummed gently back to life, but she woke instantly when the floor glowstrip she was practically sitting on blinked back on. "Oh, yes, yes!" she breathed in glee, jerking upright and looking around._

_The cockpit door was still closed, though, and she and Stein shared a heavy glance before they both stood and knocked._

_It was unlocked now, and at their touch it slid silently upwards. Soul, standing across the cockpit and leaning heavily with both hands on the dash, turned to look at them over one hunched shoulder, and the blood spattered across his cheeks was less red than his eyes._

_He blinked, then lifted swollen hands and said numbly, "He wants to sell the ship to the Imperium."_

_Maka swallowed down hot tears and edged over to him; she had to bite her lip to stifle a gasp when she saw Wes, sitting sullen and bound on the floor beside the control panel, one of his own gloves stuffed in his mouth. His left eye was already blackening, swollen to a thin sliver of red, and when he tried to say something around the glove, she saw that one of his pointed teeth had been knocked out. There was blood on his knuckles, too, and the look on his face- "We know that," she said to Soul, very softly taking him by the shoulder and guiding him away from Wes, who was being stared down by an incredibly pissed-off Stein._

"_Where'd Stein get that hypodermic?" Soul said cautiously, rousing a bit and beginning to prod gingerly at his right knuckles._

"_No idea." Maka took his hand and started her own examination, aware that she was blinking rather fast and out of breath for no real reason, but seeing blood shining like horrid jewels on Soul's olive skin- it was awful. "We knew he wanted to sell the ship," she said softly, glancing back over her shoulder at Wes. "But did he- did he try and steal it?"_

_Soul nodded slowly, and she heard his teeth begin to grind. "I heard him, I thought… I don't know, I just followed, and he didn't notice me until he'd already locked the door, and we… fought. He was trying to deliver the ship to an Imperium bidder on the southern docks."_

"_He went and found someone to _buy _it?" Maka gasped, incensed._

_Soul shrugged and looked moody, which actually meant he was feeling about a billion too many feelings for his own comfort. "I'm sorry."_

"_It's not your fault! He's the one being a complete moonbrained idiot lately!" Maka said the last loud enough for Wes to hear; he glared as effectively as he could with one good eyeball. "Anyway," she continued, at a more normal tone, "We're fine, we're still docked, although I bet we'll get some odd looks tomorrow morning for all the bouncing, damnit… Well, listen just- go get cleaned up, okay?" The sight of that blood would kill her._

_Soul didn't move. "What do we do?"_

"_Huh?"_

"_With Wes. With my brother."_

"_We- what do you mean, what do we do?"_

_Soul stared at her, then licked his split lip. His tongue put a soft smear of wet pink onto his cheek. "Maka. He tried to sell the ship out from under us. He'd have had Imperium evict you in the middle of the night! He tried to sell our ship! Our home! To kick us fucking out of our own home!"_

"_Breathe, okay, just please calm down-"_

"_You calm down! I'll be calm when that piece of shit traitor's off this ship!" Soul bellowed, and then he wheeled around at his brother and started hissing musical abuse that made Maka's skin crawl._

_Stein sat for a long time with his head in his hands as they argued, and then he kicked Westing off the ship. He did it very simply and quietly, just marched him to collect his possessions- twelve years' worth of living fit in a single backpack- and then they watched one of their own, snarling and still streaked with his brother's blood, march off the ship and into the neon night._

"_I named him," Stein said later, sounding almost bewildered, when they were all sitting in nervous weeping silence around the table. "West, humanity's always gone westward, to have a westing course is to have hope, and he's a bad guy now. What the fuck is going on?"_

_Maka cried for days, but Soul didn't make a sound._


	6. Chapter Five

Soul was waiting, not very patiently, for the ship's computer to finish calculating their fuel budget based on several possible courses back to Orcus- last night everyone had gotten together, both a little calmer and a little more aware of the grim reality of their choice- and they'd all decided to return there, to check on Liz and Pattie and allow Tsubaki to make contact with her fellow Fletchers to learn their next step. It was dull work, sitting and staring at the blank holoscreen, and he'd already performed a few quick bursts from the ship's reaction control thrusters, slowing their momentum to almost nothing. It was all waiting now, waiting and thinking and stewing about the impossibility of how he, an _alien_, had actually managed to make his life more complicated.

His ears caught the tiny buzz deep inside the dashboard that always meant the computer was about done thinking, and he perked up, yanking his boots down from their totally unprofessional position propped atop the copilot chair, which had served over the years as everything from a table, to a makeshift hospital 'bed', to a reading nook for Maka when it was Soul's turn for cryosleep during a long flight. She liked the cockpit because it reminded her of him, she'd told him once, but it bothered her to sit in his chair when he wasn't around.

Just then the beep announcing an incoming request for radio communication started up, annoyingly loud even set to the lowest possible volume. Soul frowned and flicked on the long-range scanners, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Nothing was within range, but that didn't mean much, considering how slowly the _Bullseye _was moving right now.

They were practically dead in the water, waiting for their new trajectory, and that meant a ship could be waiting just outside the boundary of their scanners.

"Fuck," he said aloud, following it up with a similar word in his own language that he'd caught from his father when he was six or seven, before all the dying started, and then he clicked on the radio. "Ready when you are. Over."

The answering voice, after a ten-second lag, was polished and bored. "This is Imperium Vessel X3-11 Wolfram Tesla. You're _Bullseye_, recently _Razor's Edge_, a Class C 2427 freighter? Verification requested, you know the drill. Over."

Soul had to swallow before he could say, "Yes. Over." Then he leaned over, pressed the switch for the ship-wide intercom, and said in his own language, "Maka, get up here now." She'd hear her name and get the gist.

"Eh?" said the voice.

"Nothing. Sorry. Yes, that's us. Over."

Another lag; it was infuriatingly suspenseful. Soul yanked his fingers out of his mouth as soon as he realized he was chewing on them. "Right, right. Uh, well, we're supposed to tell you you're needed in Junction City as soon as possible. Some legal thing. Lucky we ran into you, they _just _put the bulletin out a week or two ago."

Shit. "Legal thing?" Soul said, and he didn't have to fake his irritated tone. "We're on our way to a terraforming job for _you _guys, and now we're supposed to turn around?"

"Sorry. Not my decision, buddy. They, uh, they did say it wasn't optional. Over."

Soul hissed quietly, and then Maka burst in, looking a little crazed. "Who is it?"

"Imperium," he said quietly, and then, over the radio, "You're _sure_, because it's gonna cost us a damn lunar sea's worth of fuel to turn this old boat around. My captain'll be pissed. Over." Maka gasped audibly at that and swatted him on the shoulder for daring to insult her precious ship; he tried to dodge, failed, and pinched her behind the knee in retaliation.

"Yeah, yeah, it's you guys, all right. Too bad, fuel's gone up, too. Over."

Fuel was _always_ going up. "Fuck. Okay, well, it'll take about forty-five minutes to calibrate the new course and a few hours to get set on it. You all need a check-in once we get turned around? Over." He held his breath after that, sharing a hopeful glance with Maka. If the moron on the other side of the radio said something like 'No, don't bother, just go already so I can get back to napping on the job' then they could stop off at Orcus without the Imperium being any the wiser, but-

"Nah, we need you to send over your new route so we can send it on to the JC docks crew, they'll be expecting you. No hurry, though, we aren't going anywhere soon, all we've got's a load of seed and stuff for the Quaoar colony, and the greedy bastards can wait, eh? Ping me when you're ready for transmission. Over."

Soul clicked off the radio without bothering to agree and let his head thunk down onto the dash. "Fuck!" Why was his life so hard? Hadn't he had _enough _shit happen to him already? Did the universe just enjoy picking particular people and thoroughly fucking them over?

Maka blinked down at him, looking very preoccupied, then started to pace the same four steps along the wall she'd always paced, back and forth and back again; there was practically a damn groove in the floor. She stuck her thumbs in the edge of her vest, chewed on her lip, showed all the familiar 'thinking' signs of Maka Albarn, Devious Master Concoctor of Plans and Plots- but then she turned to him helplessly and held out her hands. "I don't think we've got a choice, Soul."

He stared at her in disbelief. "So, what? We just go back there and let ourselves get tossed in jail or worse? We have no idea what they've got planned. Or what they _know!_"

She winced and scrubbed a hand through her hair, leaving her ragged bangs even more of a mess. "Are you forgetting Junction City's where we picked up Tsubaki? That one _city's _got more Fletchers than any other planet!"

Ah, there was the Master of Plots, cooking something up. Soul sighed in relief. Maka was spunky and cocksure and smart as a whip, and it had been annoying to say the least to see her so uncharacteristically down lately, even though she _had _fucked up. "Okay, so we go there and… hide? Ask for help? Buy new faces?"

Maka gritted her teeth and resumed pacing. "This is all my fault! If I hadn't been so _stupid _on Tethys-"

"That kind of crap isn't gonna help anyone," Soul said sharply.

She sent him an irritated look, but she stopped pacing and came over to sit in his lap and stick her chilly little hands up under his shirt. "Yeah, okay. I just- I feel bad about it. I mean, look where I got us... Um, okay, so just get the new flight route like they asked and send it over, please, play along, and I'll go talk to Tsubaki. There's gotta be _somewhere_ in Junction City that can hide a ship."

Sure, over ninety tons of metal, expensive fuel, and terraforming equipment. That would be just _super _easy to hide. Anyway, hidden, what good could it do for the Fletchers? Soul grunted sourly and said nothing, but he relented and slid an arm around her back when she pushed her face into his shoulder.

"I'll fix this. I'll get us settled and safe again," she promised, rather muffled against his shirt. He felt the toes of her boots curl possessively around his calves and had to bite back a laugh.

"I know. You always figure it out. Remember our first 'forming job? And none of the other crews would listen to you, because you were just a tiny little pigtailed teenager-"

"-I'm going to remember you said that, and also, tiny? Pot, kettle!"

"-And you locked yourself in your cabin for a week when nobody could figure out why the moss transplants were dying left and right, and _you _figured it out."

He felt her chapped lips curl slowly against his skin. "I did, didn't I? Thanks to my mom's diaries."

"And your massively oversized _brain._"

She sniffed. "It's a perfectly appropriate size, thank you, and anyway brain size isn't correlated with intelligence."

"Whatever. Nerd. Listen, go talk to Tsu, make a plan, and I'll get us turned around to Junction City, all right, Captain?"

"Your tone is suspiciously mutinous, _pilot_."

He raised a brow. "Well, it's not appropriate to think dirty thoughts about one's Captain, is it? Maybe a mutiny's in order." He hefted her more securely up onto his lap, ignoring her startled squawk, and began nibbling up and down her neck, drinking in her giggles. She grabbed his face in both hands and yanked him into a heated kiss that was at least ninety percent pure fire, the way it always was with Maka despite all the years they'd slipped through together. She was slow-burning coals and barely banked passion, all the better for being so carefully hidden under her usual rigid propriety.

He held her stubbornly when they parted, and she smiled when he stroked his thumbs across her cheekbones. "Take me to Junction City, pilot, and save the mutiny for later," she ordered playfully, slipping off his lap and tapping a fingernail on the dash.

He saluted, lips twitching, and she laughed as she walked out.

* * *

><p>Tsubaki was spitting, boiling, volcanically mad, and Black Star was probably going straight to the center of the nearest black hole for even thinking it when so much was going wrong, but she looked stupidly <em>hot<em>. She was so kind normally, and sweet; seeing her in fight mode was interesting to say the least. She could yell at him any day. "What exactly are the charges?" she was hissing, finger planted squarely in the glossy blue chestplate of the wide-eyed Imperium soldier who'd met them at the Junction City docks the second they landed.

It was probably a good thing Tsu had taken this one, really, because Maka was being physically held back by Soul and Stein, and she was getting steadily redder in the face, which never preceded anything good. In fact Black Star usually hid when she got like that, but then again he was also usually _responsible_ for the look.

"Uh- you- well, I don't actually know, I just follow orders, ma'am," the soldier managed, exchanging a wide-eyed look with the docks manager.

"Then get on your damn _radio_ and find me someone who does know what the hell is going on! This type of treatment is _not _what I pay taxes for!" Tsubaki injected so much haughty, well-bred scorn into her tone that the soldier practically fumbled his radio off the docks in his mad scramble to rip it off his belt.

"I'll just, um, get my captain, ma'am, but you all can't leave until this is settled, I'm sorry!"

Tsubaki rolled her eyes and began tapping a foot pointedly on the ground; the soldier's gaze drifted down to her boots, clearly the very finest artificially grown leather money could buy and so new they still squeaked, and he actually _scampered_ away, clutching his radio; the docks manager followed, aiming an extremely nervous-looking smile at all of them.

Black Star had to laugh. Tsubaki flashed him a sneaky little grin over her shoulder and confessed, "I've never actually paid taxes. I wasn't seventeen yet when I left home!"

"Rebel," he teased.

She blushed a little and started playing with her ponytail. "Well, it works! People put up with an awful lot if they think you're rich. That's why I kept my old clothes."

"Heh. I'll keep that in mind." He pretended to take a sip from an imaginary teacup, crooking his pinky out outrageously at the same time he stuck his nose up in the air. "Do I look rich yet? Oh, shit, wait, the grease probably ruins it, huh?"

"I don't mind the grease," Tsubaki said shyly, ducking her head.

Black Star fought the urge to hurl himself into the sun out of sheer excitement and said instead, after a careful glance around, "So what's next, huh?"

She shrugged lightly. "We get the ship safe and then make contact."'

Contact. With the top-secret rebellion that had the whole Imperium scrambling! That sounded _super _awesome. "Is there a code word? A hidden doorway that only opens if you _bleed _on it? A secret handshake?"

She smiled warmly, eyebrows raised. "Not, uh, not exactly- ooh, here they come! Shh!" In an instant she was all business again, and suddenly Black Star felt his own excitement drop clean away, because now there were _four_ people in blue armor marching towards them, all armed with blasters that shone menacingly in the sun. Maka, looking marginally more calm- perhaps she'd finally started those weird breathing exercises Stein had ordered her to do- stepped up beside Tsubaki, arms crossed aggressively.

"Hello there," said one of the new soldiers, very businesslike; her breastplate bore the stark white, hollow circle of a sergeant. "I understand we're having a little problem here. Can I help?"

"We just want to know why we were pulled away from a 'forming job for _you _guys and ordered back here," Maka bluffed. "It cost a good bit of fuel."

The sergeant eyed Maka, turned to look at the ship, and then began scrolling through her wrist computer. "Well. Let's see, then. Hmm…" When she looked up, her face had gone from friendly to ice-cold. Suddenly Black Star was sweating buckets, and his fingers itched for one of his heavy wrenches. He saw Tsubaki's eyes narrow as she slid one foot subtly back, taking a fighting stance. "This ship and its crew have all been flagged for mandatory detainment."

"Mandatory?" Maka said, jaw dropping. Suddenly she looked rather frightened, but then a moment later she straightened up again and got that familiar mulish look. "Why?"

The sergeant raised a brow at Maka's tone and waved her wrist computer around emphatically. "Illegal, _knowing_ transport of unregistered colonial immigrants, improper distribution of controlled genetically modified organisms, and civil disobedience."

"None of which are things that, on first strike, require arrest. Not under the Imperium Constitution," Maka snapped, bristling.

"Wha- well, that may be, I'm no lawyer, but I've been told to _detain_ you and I'm just here to do my job."

Maka's eyes were hard. "Don't you care about the _law? _Detaining suspects without an official warrant of probable cause is _illegal _and-"

"Excuse me," the sergeant interrupted, looking rather flinty herself and leaning forward to go toe-to-toe with Maka. Black Star could see high spots of color on her cheeks, and her hand was hovering dangerously close to the butt of her blaster. "I'm not detaining you, pigtails, I'm detaining your ship. The _Bullseye_ is not to fly until further notice. You have eight hours to pack your belongings and lock up any personal quarters or cargo before your ship is moved to an Imperium storage facility. We advise you drain your fuel, since long periods at rest can result in-"

"I'm a _Captain_," Maka bellowed, at incredible volume for such a small woman; Black Star saw Soul, right behind her, cringe and cover his ears. Several people wandering the docks near other ships actually stopped in their tracks to gape. Black Star flipped them off one by one. They'd been expecting a fine, threats, maybe confiscation of some of their more valuable cargo and tools, or even forced downtime in Junction City for a while, but not this. It was impossible, unbelievable, and devastating, and Black Star felt suddenly very much like a child again, back when he hadn't known each night where he'd sleep. He became suddenly aware that his jaw was clenched so tight it hurt, and he forced himself to relax. It was a fucked up day when the government could confiscate a _ship, _private property, a home and a livelihood in one fell swoop, and the ship captain's defense wasn't 'I'm innocent until proven guilty, let me fight these charges,' but rather, 'You just simply _say_ I did these things, present no real proof, and I can't possibly defend myself in any way, shape, or form, but I think the punishment is too harsh.'

Maka wasn't done yet, though. "I know what sitting fuel can do, I'm not an idiot! I'm not going to blow up the damn docks! And _you_ are not taking my ship! No one lays a finger on my ship!"

The sergeant, obviously having reached the end of her patience and then some with this stubborn crew, sighed gustily and reached up to rub her forehead, like taking someone's _home _was a nuisance for her, an everyday sort of tedium. There was no sympathy on her face, no pity, not even an effort at understanding. She looked at them the same way Black Star had seen soldiers look at druggies, prostitutes, murderers; anyone who went against the Imperium at all was lumped together, regardless of intention or degree of offense. "I'm not. Imperium is, and if you ask me you deserve it, ferrying illegals all over without any regard for-"

She was cut off by Maka, who dived forward with an infuriated war cry and landed a punch to her jaw that practically echoed.

The sergeant's eyes crossed and she went down in a crumpled heap in the half-second before the other soldiers waded into the fray. Black Star, fuming and far closer to panic than he'd ever admit out loud, was only about an inch away from leaping in himself despite being unarmed and in full view of the public, but they had Maka outnumbered, and they hauled her to her feet easily enough, though she was screaming and kicking like a maniac. Soul was white as his hair, teeth showing in a snarl and hands in fists, but he kept his position with admirable self-control.

"It's my _ship," _she kept yelling, and something in her voice made Black Star's chest hurt. "It's my ship! You can't take it away! It's mine! You can't just _decide_ and then take it!"

The sergeant got back to her feet, pink-faced and prodding her jaw, then said icily, "Let her go. This is your last chance to cooperate, lady, and I'm being merciful, because if I wanted I could haul you away right now for assaulting military personnel."

The soldiers looked at each other cautiously, but they did let go, and Maka started to cry the moment she was free, tiny tears that thickened her voice into sheer pain, hands rising helplessly to press against her chest. Her eyes were wide and frantic. "You can't take my ship! It's my property, it's my home! I didn't do anything _wrong! _I was help-"

Stein stepped up and put an arm around her shoulders, sending the sergeant a glare so purely evil- made more so by the demonic scarlet of his false eye- that it was sort of surprising the air didn't just _freeze._ Black Star had seen that particular glare before, unfortunately, and he knew exactly what it meant; Stein was silently swearing painful, inventive, insidious revenge, and no doubt he'd memorized the military ID number embossed on her armguards. "We'd better pack, Maka."

She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes and stood there for exactly five seconds within the circle of Stein's arm, swaying, white-faced, then ripped away and walked quickly to the open door of the cargo hold. Everyone followed, though Stein and Soul lingered for a long moment, scowling at the soldiers. Black Star, who had recently realized with no little horror that he'd better grow up a bit if he ever wanted to impress a quality badass like Tsubaki, used all his willpower and contented himself with another rude gesture and briefly sticking his tongue out.

Maka was hunched over, leaning forward with both hands on a crate full of bacterial cultures and incubators, but she straightened up once the crew was inside and Black Star had closed the door. She was dry-eyed now, ferocious, practically electric, and it was incredibly reassuring. Tsubaki seemed to feel the same, because she sent Black Star a little smile and nodded approvingly towards Maka, who cleared her throat and said grimly, "Right now there's nothing we can do, not if we want to keep our liberty and our chance to join the rebellion- and I think all of us see even more clearly how necessary that rebellion is."

Everybody nodded, and Soul, leaning moodily against the wall and eyeing everyone from beneath his hair, made a harsh, throaty sound of angry agreement.

Maka took a deep breath, hooking her thumbs in her belt. "Okay. Tsubaki, go pack and then see if your Fletcher friends can help. If they, uh, still want us without the ship. Tell them we thought we'd have a little time to hide it."

"They will still want you," Tsubaki said quietly. "This fight's going to take a long time to win."

"Good. Black Star, go with her."

Yes! He leapt into the air with a whoop, accidentally clocked his head on the underside of the stairs leading up to the catwalk, and his short victory ended in ignominious defeat as he bled all over one of Tsubaki's expensive moonmoth silk scarves.

He glimpsed his captain again as Tsubaki steered him away, cooing and dabbing at his forehead; Maka looked like glass, like she might break if someone breathed on her too hard, but then Soul edged up and brushed his hand against hers while she instructed Stein on what to do with their remaining cargo, and she turned right back to deadly tempered steel.

* * *

><p><em>His brother stunk, and Soul didn't understand why, except deep down he did. His greatest sense might be his hearing, but he still remembered that cloying, sweet, gagging smell of decay. He'd smelled it when his family members began to die, and he'd smelled it when his brother put him in the strange, cold bed, gently closed his eyes and told him not to be afraid as wires began to stir.<em>

_He knew intuitively that those things had happened a long time ago, knew he and his brother had been asleep for a very long time, but it _felt _like yesterday. He'd only woken up in this dark, metal place a few days ago, after all, to the curious green eyes and violent prodding of the little girl with the raspy sharp voice. _

_She was very nice, although her insistence on dragging him into the room where the bloody man lay and writhed, waving his singed stump through the air and screaming so that it hurt his ears, was annoying. But she'd given him his new name, and he'd welcomed it- the old one was both nearly impossible for her to say, and nearly impossible for him to bear hearing from someone other than his dead family._

_Anyway, she'd undoubtedly wrinkle her nose when she smelled the death on Soul's brother and bully him into the odd little metal waterfall closet to get clean._

_"Don't stare at me like that," Soul's brother sang ill-temperedly._

_"Sorry," said Soul, unable to keep the nervous high pitch from his voice. "What were you doing in there? We weren't supposed to go in that room, you said."_

_His brother looked at him for a long time, and then he wiped his sweating forehead, leaving a streak of something dark. "There were bodies. They might have gotten the sickness at our home, the same as our parents did, and then we could get sick too. I didn't- if the man dies, I can't fly this spaceship. I had to drag them to the- the ejection place and get them off the ship."_

_They were flying? Soul shook his head roughly and stood up. "Do you want help?" he said reluctantly, feeling astonishingly short and small next to his strong, older big brother._

_"No. I've only got one more." His brother paused for a moment, staring with shadowed eyes at nothing, and when he spoke again, there was the unmistakable ululation of mourning in his song. "It's her mother, or maybe her sister. Identical. Keep looking after her, all right? And keep the man alive. Can you do that for me?"_

_"Yes," Soul said stoutly, twisting his hands in his shirt, which still smelled a little like home, fresh and wild. "Yes. I'll look after her."_

* * *

><p>"You!" Maka felt her jaw drop, but she was helpless to stop it.<p>

The mechanic who'd serviced the _Bullseye_ last time they were in Junction City blinked. "Uh. Me?"

"You worked on my ship!"

"I work on a lotta ships." The mechanic was clearly unimpressed.

Tsubaki broke in. "Mira, this is Captain Maka Albarn. Of the _Bullseye."_

Mira frowned and looked Maka up and down, like she was livestock or something. "And?"

Tsubaki laughed. "Previously the _Razor's Edge."_

"Oh, shit, really? This little shrimp- wait, it's a whole crew of shrimps, look at the blue haired one! This is the crew we wanted to recruit so bad?" Mira was clutching her ribs now, laughing a gorgeous belly laugh that probably sounded like liquid sunshine to Soul's ears. To Maka it was only irritating.

"You're short too," she said snippily, crossing her arms. Soul and Black Star, lurking further back in the alley and devouring some kind of greasy 'meat' pies from a stand in the marketplace, both looked hideously offended.

Tsubaki patted her earnestly on the shoulder. Maka stared sourly up at the tall, willowy girl; it wasn't _fair. _If she'd been tall intimidating people would be just so much easier. "Maka, Mira is the one who put you on our radar. She sent me after you."

Well. Maka had to reevaluate at that. This petite, dreadlocked, irreverent, _mouthy_ woman covered in grease and smelling of cheap cigarettes wasn't just a Fletcher, she was one of the people in charge. "Oh."

"Sorry to hear about the ship," Mira, who was actually a perfectly average height, told her, serious again. "Believe it or not, I got here on that old boat. Knew your folks. Good people. It was a great loss to the cause when they died. Not that they ever joined up officially, but they were with us, you know."

The world tilted, ever so slowly, and Maka put a hand on the grimy wall beside her, swallowing. Some daring soul had written on it in glimmering gold perma-ink the phrase, 'fly fast die yung leave a skinny corps cuz imps runing out of room to stash the bodies.' Weirdly poetic, if grammatically incorrect. "You knew my parents?"

Mira cocked her head, blue eyes sharp and interested. They were so unnaturally bright they _had _to be prosthetics, and they made her look hawkish, predatory. "I did. Kami and Spirit." She looked over Maka's head at Stein, who hadn't said a single word since they left the _Bullseye _behind, wearing everything they owned on their backs. "Knew him, too, but that was less fun. He stabilized any with old age?"

"Er," said Maka diplomatically, catching the tell-tale _snick snick _that meant Stein was playing with his scalpel-fingers again. "How'd you know them?"

Mira grinned, showcasing a missing front tooth and long, pointed silver caps on her canines. "They smuggled me here, actually. I snuck on board and stowed away. The old Captain nearly dumped me overboard mid-trip, straight into space."

"Sounds fun," Maka said faintly. "Look, can we… that is, um, we want to help. We want to fight. All of us, and I'm sorry they took the ship but I'm sure we can appeal or something, get it back."

Mira shrugged, absently running a tongue over one sharp silver tooth. "You and I both know that ship's never leaving ground again unless she's got a bellyful of Imp soldiers. Sorry, sweetheart, that's just how it is. They're never gonna give her up."

The bitter darkness in Maka's heart grew, just a little, and her mouth tasted like flames when she said, "I would say that losing my ship makes it personal, but it's been personal since they killed my parents. So we're all in. Anything we can do."

Mira's answering smile was slow, syrupy, and cunning. Suddenly she looked quite terrifying. "Well. I've got a bit of room above my shop. Be cramped for you all but it's better than the streets by a long shot, and you all can work for your living. How 'bout it?"

"We can pay rent," Maka said stiffly.

"Not for long, you can't, with no ship. I bet none of you've ever held a _real _job, eh? No experience, nothing but floating, you damn sky rats," Mira chortled merrily. "Ah, well, that's how it goes. Come on, then, it's getting cold." She walked right off with no more warning than that, steps fast and firm, and everyone scampered to follow, trailing after her like ducklings.

Soul, licking his fingers from his pie, caught up to Maka and said quietly, "What do you think?"

She hummed, hopping over what could have been either the corpse of a stray ratdog or a heap of particularly fragrant garbage. "Well, we're stuck now, really."

"That's not what I asked." He looked at her searchingly, and the bitterness receded just a little. Soul was her moon, whipping the tides of her spirit to wild heights and then calming her with just a glance, and she'd never been so grateful to be caught in his gravity.

"I- well, I think we were very lucky they sent Tsubaki after us when they did," she said honestly.

"Me too." He brushed a fingertip against her palm. "This is okay, Maka. We'll make it okay."

"To the end, right?" she whispered, knowing he'd be the only one to hear in the bustle all around them.

"To the end." He smiled toothily and waggled his eyebrows. "This's just another route to the end anyway."

"Morbid! You're wonderful." She cackled and hip-checked him into Black Star, who, caught by surprise- he'd been hypnotized by Tsubaki's ass, it seemed- flailed and nearly went down, just missing a woman carrying two toddlers strapped to her chest and back. She cursed colorfully in a language Maka didn't know and kicked him enthusiastically in the shins before scurrying away.

It was the first near-collision of many, and not only because Black Star was hopping for a while. Junction City was the most populated colony in the system, by far, and the upper class tended to live in the floating space stations that sparkled like watchful eyes in the pale blue sky. The 'city' label was a misnomer, too, because what had started out as the third extraterrestrial human colony ever- the first to succeed- was now a massive, buzzing hive that wrapped clear around the moon, supporting a population in the hundreds of millions with what amounted to duct tape, overtaxing and a prayer. The city was miles deep in the earth, miles high into the sky, a stratified scab of humanity pocked with settlements of alien activity. Glieseans tended to live deep, and, being so heavy, they didn't go far from home. Kuipers were almost exclusively laborers, working whatever menial jobs they could get, legal or not- and usually they weren't. They were much more scattered than the Glieseans, but even they weren't usually dumb enough to go out in packs of less than three.

Kuipers, unfortunately, were tasty, and their limited ability to speak didn't deter some of the many very hungry humans in Junction City's dirty underbelly.

But Mira was leading them to a neighborhood not too far from the docks, and not _terribly_ bad. There were gradually fewer and fewer people in the narrow streets, and more vehicles; with higher income came self-expression, and nothing wasn't for sale in Junction City, including body parts. The people they passed grew progressively stranger. A woman slunk by in a low-backed dress, and all the gleaming white knobs of her naked vertebrae were exposed beneath slick, translucent parchment-skin. More than one cyborg passed by- or rolled- clicking and whirring in various unsettling ways, and Soul began to fit in _much_ more than he usually did. Barely anyone walked by without some sign of body modification or exotic accessory. It made 'human' sort of a confusing word. There were a few Kuipers, too, slithering by uneasily in the shadows, yellow-furred eyespots blown wide and nearly covering their heads.

Now, in the evening, it was all lit by the hovering glow-balloons floating at regular intervals- those still functioning, anyway- and Maka was suddenly and forcibly reminded of spells, magic and haunted places and strange things in the sky. Her skin was crawling, though that could just be the heavy press of suffocating humanity, tangible and looming all around her.

"Okay?" asked Soul, eyes reflecting all the glow-balloons like internal constellations when he looked at her.

"Yes," she lied. He had stars in his eyes, but that could only do so much. She was only eight hours on the ground and yet she already ached for the real stars like a missing limb.

"Hm," he said.

"I said _yes!_"

"Hmmmm."

She slit her eyes at him. "We're in the effective center of the Imperium army."

"I'm aware. We're outnumbered. Dandy!"

She moved closer, lowered her voice even more; in a rare display of public affection, he draped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close and bowing his head until their temples nearly touched. "We're in the middle of it now. This is the best planet in the world except maybe Old Earth to disappear in, and when you're fighting a guerrilla war, disappearing is the most important part," she said softly, sliding her own arm around his waist.

"Are we technically at war?" he mused.

"They took my ship, so yes, it's war now. It's my war."

"It's everybody's fight, Maka, you're not the only one they've hurt."

She licked suddenly dry lips. "Yeah, well. Okay. But if I think about that it feels like it's impossible."

"It's not. We might not live to see it end, but it will. Things always balance out in time."

"When did you get so wise?"

He snorted softly and pressed a kiss to her hair. "Born this way?"

"Ha!"

"Hey, you asked." He grew serious then, gaze glassy as they all trudged past a group of women missing their hands- thieves that had tried Imperium's patience too many times. "Maka, they took our ship. Because we _helped _people survive. We didn't hurt anyone, and they still took it. Because we helped, the same reason they killed your family. I mean… we could die. If they catch us they'll shoot us into space and that'll be that, you know that."

"I know," she told him quietly, trying to swallow down the feelings and fears welling up hot and insistent in her throat. "Everybody's gotten used to the idea that the Imperium's infallible, like they're indestructible or something, but we're going to prove they _can_ be hurt, and then- the ones who come after will find the courage to do the same. My parents fought, and they _died, _and it's time I honored that. It's time I did more to protect people than just talk and play pranks."

Soul was looking at her in a way she didn't understand, except that it was almost like the face he'd worn when they'd visited the Venusian Symphony for her eighteenth birthday, reverent and awed and a little afraid. He read the empty breaths between her words like she read books, he knew the things she couldn't or wouldn't say, and suddenly her heart was beating embarrassingly fast.

"Okay, Captain, it's war. Let's do it," he said at last, and then he said he loved her in his own language, soft and sweet against her ear.

It had been a long and painful day, to say the least, but Maka was still surprised to feel a tear go rolling down her cheek.


	7. Chapter Six

The hull of the massive Imperium ship was rough. It sat silently, hulking and ominous, a sleeping dragon scaled with a million tiny, thick, high-temperature surface insulation tiles. It was the perfect surface for the shadow to climb up. Blue haired and wearing darker, perfectly matte blue clothing that matched the shadows and blurred his edges, he inched his way painstakingly up the vast curved surface, clinging like a spider. In less than thirty minutes he was at the top, and the sixteenth entry hatch he tested was unlocked, in a stroke of luck that had him doing a very silent and extremely graceless jig of joy.

The next morning, all ten thousand soldiers aboard the ship would wake up right on time, unsuspecting, but within the week they'd be out in deep space and wondering uneasily why the artificial gravity kept malfunctioning. They'd lose precious cargo when the altered gravity sent crates flying around the cargo hold, and more than a few of them spent hours stuck to the ground on their backs, like overturned turtles. Even more odd, nobody would be able to figure out just _exactly_ what was wrong with the gravity generators, none of the higher-ups and none of Imperium's best mechanics. When the troops finally hit dirt after the longest damn trip of their lives, to walk among underfed, overworked colonists who all had the same flashing, bitter eyes, they'd be unaware that their boots and armor were impregnated with invisible spores just waiting to grow.

They were very special spores, made to help repair ecosystems that hadn't been terraformed correctly in the first place due to budget cuts and Imperium impatience. They were genetically altered by one of the few entirely authentic mad scientists left in the solar system- and really, he'd embraced the title and decided long ago to be crazy enough for several men. Within a year, the colonists would notice huge patches of fragrant, velvety purplish moss blooming across their previously barren moon, adding nutrients to the soil and purifying the air, and then soon some enterprising scientist would notice that their crops were growing better, higher and faster and stronger.

But for now, the blue shadow only grinned as he slipped away, mission complete. A faint, victorious, extremely off-pitch yodel echoing from the depths of the city was the only sign he'd ever been there- that, and the titanic male genitalia painted with wonderful detail on the top of the towering ship, where nobody would see it for months.

* * *

><p>"Why'd you leave home?"<p>

Tsubaki looked away from her plans and down at him, wide-eyed. The soft reflections of a hundred glowing names and lists and maps, all the Fletcher data there _was_, showed faintly on her face. "Huh?"

"I mean, you know." He walked his fingertips up the bumps of her spine- she was too thin, too stressed lately, but then they all were- and then gave a gentle tug on the end of her ponytail, pulling her back down to lie on his chest. She shut off the holo-tablet she'd been working on with a soft beep and stretched an arm out to set it carefully on the floor. "It sounds like you had everything I wanted growin' up, money, schooling, a rocketbike, all that. Why'd you leave? What made you… care?"

She closed her eyes, and it took a long time for her to begin speaking. He waited patiently; she always had something to say that made him think, whether they were discussing breakfast or the best ways to overthrow the entire solar system's corrupt government. "I had to. I was dying there in a lot of ways. My family… my father and mother fought in the revolutionary war. I was born after they'd been dead for _years_. Stored embryo, uh, because my brother needed some organs. He's sick. I refused to donate, he took me to court, he called me his _property_… so I ran. He's sick in the head, too, especially now that he's getting older... He was a soldier, back when we first made contact with the Glieseans. And I'd been in school to be a doctor, but I.. I guess I got tired of being told who I couldn't and couldn't help."

Black Star sucked in a slow breath, staring up at the yellowed ceiling of one of Mira's tiny upstairs guest rooms. Really it was a glorified closet, but it was a lot better than he'd had when he was a kid. "Shit."

"Yeah," she whispered, curling closer. "He killed a lot of them. He was there for all the nuclear drops, all of that. He even ordered some of it. I don't _think_ he would ever have hurt me, as long as I listened to him, anyway, but it was… it became harder and harder to love a person who could proudly believe such terrible things. I tried for years, and it wore me away. I was a ghost for a while."

He cupped a tender hand around the velvety back of her neck. "Sounds like you're better off away from him."

"Yeah. Just, um… draw a bigger dick on the ship next time, okay?"

He gaped at her, eyebrows shooting up, then snickered. "Yeah, okay."

* * *

><p>A pretty young woman, well-dressed, tall and dark-haired, smiled appealingly at the Imperium security official; he practically melted. Visibly dazzled, he opened up Sky Heights' gates for her. It was the most exclusive neighborhood in all of Junction City, consisting mostly of seasonal homes for the wealthy, who usually lived in the lavish orbiting space stations, far above all the muck and chaos, but this girl obviously belonged. Anyway, who hadn't accidentally forgotten their identification papers at home before? It was a common mistake. A perfectly legitimate excuse.<p>

She kept smiling at him as she stepped into the ornate lift, gave a little wave as she ascended, and the soldier didn't notice the hard glint in her eyes.

Forty-two minutes later, she was safely hidden in some extremely expensive bushes just outside the clear, domed bubble protecting Tierra Roberts' gorgeous home and grounds. Tierra Roberts was both an ex-Imperium sergeant major and Junction City's elected council representative for ten years running- elected in the sense that somehow she _always_ won, and somehow the board in charge of the vote ended up with much fatter bank accounts immediately after the last ballot had been counted.

Tierra Roberts was a great believer in the democratic system.

She also believed that a certain class of organism- namely, aliens, animals and anyone unemployed or uneducated- tended to sink naturally to the bottom of things, where they belonged, and she worked strenuously to keep things so nicely separated out.

Tierra Roberts was a greedy, immoral bitch- Tsubaki, following Mira and Maka's lead, called her much worse things inside the privacy of her skull, but 'bitch' was about the limit of the profanity she could speak out loud. Outside of Black Star's bed, anyway.

She fought down the massive blush that thought caused- no need to set fire to the bushes and get caught- and twelve scratchy, insect-filled hours later, she was tromping happily back to the lift. They'd hit pay dirt like she'd never thought possible, all because of Maka's brainstorm- Maka had been the one to suggest going right to the top, and how, and months of surveillance and close calls had finally paid off.

It was a different security guard at the gates to Sky Heights, and he eyed her askance. Probably it was the leaves in her hair, her scratched-up arms, and just maybe the evil grin on her face, but she couldn't _help _it. Tsubaki patted her purse gently, careful to keep the camera inside- a special model, not on the market, modified by Fletcher's best programmers to record body heat images even through several walls- safe.

The next morning Tierra Roberts sat down to a breakfast of fresh, _real _fruit, and booted up the daily news on her holographic projector. Her name was all over the headlines, and so were the crisp thermal images of her personal conference with the Gliesean ambassadors, the one she'd said would lead to 'new horizons and great progress in alien-human relations'.

The Glieseans were unarmed, quite clearly; there were shots of them arriving, during, and leaving the conference. Tierra Roberts' many security guards _were _armed, and the very best shot- the one Mira blew up and framed- showed Roberts nodding her head to one of the Glieseans while two of her security guards, wearing shining blue armor that showed up pitch-black on the thermal images, held their blasters to its body. It was coercion of the most violent kind.

Tsubaki saved each and every article she could find on a data drive and gave it to Maka, wrapped in a little black ribbon. They got outrageously drunk on cheap rice wine; Mira found them blissfully passed out together on the floor, beneath a hologram of Junction City's _former _council representative.

Mira was so pleased that later, when she stumbled wearily home, she only kicked them once each to wake them up.

* * *

><p>"Hey, Maka?"<p>

"Hmm?"

Tsubaki hemmed and hawed for a moment, then said tentatively, "Do you think we'll win?"

Maka blinked. "Well- why are you asking me, you're the one who's been doing this since you were, what, sixteen?"

Tsubaki flushed a little and started actually wringing her hands. "I know, I just- if I really let myself think about it, about the numbers and all the other rebellions that _failed_ and the cold hard data, I mean, it just seems impossible!"

Maka regarded her with raised brows, then sat down, putting aside the petri dish and pipetter she'd been working with. She peeled off her gloves, shoved her safety glasses up on her head, and said firmly, "Sit."

Tsubaki sat.

"Listen," Maka started. "The odds are overwhelming. That's true. It's your _job _to know that. But remember what you told me? That the reason the Fletchers have lasted this long is because of the _people?"_

Tsubaki looked teary for a moment, then she smiled. "The good people, the strong ones. I remember. I told you we were the best."

"Yeah, and it's true. I've met more smart people in the last few months than I have pretty much my whole life! We've got scientists, pilots, mechanics, politicians, business leaders- we've got _quality_, because anyone with a brain can see that they way Imperium's going will drive humanity into the ground. Okay? We're better than them. We'll win."

Tsubaki handed her a fresh pair of disposable gloves with a shy grin. "Yeah, okay. I just get-"

"We're all nervous. It's normal. Keeps us sharp, right?"

"Right."

Tsubaki left, and Soul slunk in from nowhere in a creepy way that meant he'd been hanging out with Stein too much lately. "Hey."

"Hey," she said, squinting into her microscope. She didn't see him come up and sit beside her, but she felt it. "Don't touch anything."

"Yeah, yeah. Did you mean that? What you told Tsu?"

She pulled away from the microscope and looked him right in the eye. "Yes. I do think Imperium will be brought down eventually. No government's perfect, but they've done too much wrong for too long. We'll all be fine."

Soul sighed and leaned forward to rest his forehead on her shoulder. He was feverish, with split knuckles and a bruised cheek from a late-night scrape with Imperium soldiers during a Fletcher mission, and Maka could hardly bear to touch him even as she couldn't possibly _not. _She knew she probably looked much the same, and they were both getting so, so tired of living paranoid and violent. "Your pulse picks up when you lie," he mumbled.

"Yeah."

* * *

><p>Maka was nervous, extremely nervous, or maybe it was more excitement than anything else, but it manifested just like nerves- sweaty palms, bellyful of butterflies, pounding pulse.<p>

It felt like fighting, and it felt like hope, for the first time in a long time. She ran a finger over the black ribbon tied around her wrist, took a deep breath, pulled on two pairs of rubber gloves, and opened her wire cutters.

The highly electrified fence made an awful screeching, crackling sound with each wire that she cut, and it sounded incredibly loud in the late evening air, even with all the usual backdrop clamor of Junction City's endless nightlife.

She gritted her teeth and kept going, flinching back from each bright spray of sparks. Three more cuts and she'd made a hole big enough to slip through safely. The Imperium soldier barracks were straight ahead- thank _god_, that map the Fletchers had was accurate- and she had her back up against the cool stone wall, cringing behind a stack of crates, before she could talk herself out of it.

Breaking and entering, armed with intent, maybe even chemical assault or terrorism- they wouldn't just toss her in jail if they caught her, they'd shoot her and toss her in a landfill faster than she could say, "Can I at least get a trial?"

She took another breath, looking every which way, and then she leaned down to flick on the hoverboots she'd borrowed from another Fletcher last night, during their planning session, over twenty people huddled in a tiny basement room around a cheap flickering holographic projector and a computer system from decades ago. It had smelled like rancid tobacco and sweat, but it had sounded like laughter and camaraderie and grim, practical determination. Borrowing shoes had been the least weird part about it.

The boots hummed, made an audible whooshing sound, but that was all. She wobbled a little as they kicked in fully, floating her a wavering six feet off the ground- not much, but enough to reach the little metal grate concealing an intake for the air filtration system.

She barely resisted the urge to bang on it. Stupid thing. Colonists had to breathe low-oxygen, highly polluted, poor-quality air every day of their lives, but the moment someone decided they'd join the Imperium they got some of the best oxygen on the planet, because the Imperium liked its soldiers to serve them for a long time and damn the cost.

She thought suddenly, with a pang, of Patti and Liz and the masks she'd given them. With a weary, silent little prayer to the universe that the masks were holding up and that someone on Orcus had been able to read the blueprints to make more, she tapped the grate gingerly with her screwdriver.

It was a good thing she was still wearing the rubber gloves. The grate was electrified too, and the brilliant shower of sparks her screwdriver caused sent her flailing backwards, nearly snapping her spine in a valiant effort to keep herself up in the air.

She didn't fall, but it was a near thing. The damn boots had a hell of a learning curve.

Well, whatever. The grate didn't need to be undone after all; it had holes big enough for a hypodermic, and luckily for Maka, that was Stein's absolute _favorite_ way to hand out goodies, whether or not they really required it. He'd said once that he liked the intimidation factor of a nice, fat, shiny needle. She pulled the little vial out of her pocket, filled the syringe while holding her breath, capped it with a needle, and stuck it right into the grate, ignoring the sparks as best she could as the metal touched.

"Done," she whispered gleefully.

"Oh yeah?" someone said; she nearly screamed.

Two soldiers were walking through the small alley between the fence she'd cut and the wall of the barracks, obviously coming home from leave; they were staggering just a little, talking overloud, but they weren't drunk enough to not notice her.

She pressed to the wall, trembling and desperate, jaw clenched in an attempt to quiet her quick breathing, one hand itching for the battered old contraband blaster tucked into her belt.

They kept coming, and she was a heartbeat away from reaching for the gun- but the alley was narrow, and it was dark. Her luck held, for once. They didn't look up, didn't see her clinging to the wall just above their heads.

She watched them go, chatting and laughing, and then leant her forehead against the cold wall with a shaky sigh before yanking the needle back out of the air shaft, dropping back down to the ground, and darting out the cut fence, ephemeral as smoke.

The next day, the day of the traditional annual military pride parade, which was propaganda if Maka had ever seen it- fit, healthy soldiers parading their well-fed bodies through the unwashed masses, catnip to any young people who didn't know where their next meal might come from. The streets were packed, as usual, with more soldiers in full riot gear hovering watchfully over the crowds. The Imperium was pleased until, twenty minutes in, the vast majority of their soldiers began sweating, giggling, and spouting nonsense, all over the city in every section of the parade, staggering out of formation with uproarious laughter. Several of them stripped entirely naked and started dancing, following the lead of one absolutely overjoyed fellow with three parallel scars on his temple. Others began skipping, singing, pulling civilians happily into the parade and lifting children up onto their shoulders, or tossing their armor into the crowd like souvenirs, completely oblivious to their superiors' furious bellows. At one point they found a stand of watermelons and began the most disastrous game of catch Maka had ever seen.

Their rigid parade formation dissolved as they spread gently out across the city, abandoning valuable blasters and clothing in their wake, which the Fletchers- prepared and stationed at regular intervals- quietly scooped up. It was beautiful, and it was a much better parade than the Imperium had ever put on before. Soul nearly busted a rib laughing, and he and Maka left the parade panting, red-faced and teary from mirth.

Stein, tinkering with a microscope and something suspiciously like a sample of human brain tissue, looked up as they re-entered Mira's tiny loft, grinning the most devious grin Maka had ever seen. He was the absolute incarnation of smug. "Told you I had the timing down perfectly on that laughing gas," he said, waving his eyebrows. _Smugly_.

Maka wanted to be irritated, just on principle and because her boys, like everything except a little more so, tended naturally towards chaos and needed to be kept in line, but it was just too funny. She held up the blue helmet she'd caught during the parade, rather sheepishly, and then burst into giggles when Stein's face lit up. "Uh. You want a souvenir?"

"_Hell yes!"_

* * *

><p>A dreadlocked woman was so commonplace as to be boring, even one with glowing blue eyes, and a crotchety old cyborg wasn't all that out of place either, not in Junction City. Together they did garner a few raised eyebrows, but mostly that was because of the way the cyborg kept clacking his blade-tipped metal fingers together gleefully. They were wearing the standard blue overalls and tool belt of Imperium mechanics, and had perfectly forged papers. They filed aboard Imperium's second largest soldier transport ship with ease, along with a clanking shuffling crowd of twenty-odd other mechanics.<p>

They walked out twelve hours later covered head to toe in grease and feeling quite a bit more weight in their tool belts, though no one could tell by looking. They were ferrying out vital screws, bits of air hose, miniscule gears- all the little things they managed to sabotage under the guise of 'repairs' and which would take _forever_ to diagnose as a problem.

Their mission was arguably one of the easiest, least dangerous ones anybody had been assigned in a while. Even if they did get caught, the bits and pieces they'd taken could easily be passed as a mechanic's normal odds and ends supply.

Still, Stein found his steps dragging as they headed home, and it wasn't just old bones full of fatigue. "There are a lot of soldiers on that ship," he said at last. "And it's got a run scheduled to Tethys in two days."

"Yes," Mira said, staring at the sky.

"We killed a _lot _of people today. They'll die knowing it's coming, too."

"Yes." She glanced at him, a brilliant flash of violent blue. "I'd do it again."

He sighed and rubbed absently at the metal plate in his skull; Maka always laughingly told him he was 'massaging his brain' when he did that, but it was soothing. "So would I. I suppose I _will_, actually. But I'm going to wonder till I die how many of those soldiers weren't-"

"They were all Imperium. They all chose it," Mira interrupted coldly.

"Yes. And we chose this." Still, he fought his heavy old bones all the way home.

* * *

><p>The white haired man slouching in the alley was extensively modified, obviously, but it was so subtly done- except for the eyes, anyway- that most people didn't notice it until they'd already spoken with him, and then they were too close and too obvious to study him the way they wanted, unless they were really rude, anyway. But the ears didn't wriggle <em>often<em>, and the teeth weren't incredibly obtrusive, and the long fingers were usually shoved in his pockets.

"Hey, so… How'd you bleach your eyelashes without going blind?" said the pink-haired, pink-browed, pink-skinned girl in front of him him now, looking envious.

She'd managed to color her skin somehow without dying, so surely she could figure out something as simple as _eyelashes. _"Didn't," he said, blinking and furrowing his brow. "Are you _really_ sure you want to emigrate? Hair dye's pretty scarce in the colonies, you know." An understatement of massive proportions; _everything _was scarce, not just luxuries but necessities.

She narrowed her eyes warningly. "I'm _aware_, but there's no way I'm staying here and getting caught in the crossfire when this stupid city goes up in flames. Besides, I have family there. Farmers. There's nothing here for me any more, and maybe there's nothing there, but I'll have people.."

At least she had a realistic view of things. "What d'you mean up in flames?"

"What, you haven't heard? The Fletchers," she grinned, "are _really _fucking Imp deep. Anybody wearing blue nowadays is wearing a target on their backs too."

Soul grimaced. "Charming. Well, okay, look, how much can you take with you and keep hidden?"

She shrugged. Something in her arm made a whirring, gear-crank sound. "'Bout a backpack full. I'll just keep it on me."

"Okay, small stuff then. I've got a few seedlings for you. Nitrogen fixers, generalists, uh, they spread fast. Good for grazing. I've got a couple beneficial bacteria samples, I've got all the 'forming or soil testing equipment you could want, makes growing enough to eat a lot easier."

She hesitated suddenly. "Um-"

"I'm _not _gonna turn you in! Why do you think we're selling this stuff dirt cheap? The more people who smuggle in contraband to people who need it, the less of our resources we waste doing it ourselves." He didn't add that if _she_ were a spy, an Imperium sympathizer, she'd never leave the alley.

"Oh, wow, you- uh, okay. Okay." She stared at her feet, thinking. "Do the seedlings need to be watered and stuff en-route? Like, because if I have to take what I buy out in the open it's more likely to be seen and I don't fancy prison."

"Yeah, they do need some upkeep. The other stuff doesn't, though."

"Okay." They chit-chatted, haggled, and then she left with a backpack stuffed full of illegal soil testing kits, a high-quality gas mask, and three small blaster guns- all for a fraction of what she'd have paid any other black market dealer, and bought at much less personal risk. "Tell anyone else you know who needs help," he called after her as she left.

"Pretty sure the word's out there, buddy," she shouted back laughingly before disappearing around the corner.

Soul sighed. That's what he kept _hearing _lately, all over. The city was electrified now with the spirit of change and revolution, igniting in slow-motion; she hadn't been far wrong when she'd said it was bound to go up in flames soon. Hopefully she'd read the information on the data drive stuffed into the gas mask; it held everything the Fletcher movement knew about quick, easy ways to disable Imperium ships and soldiers, and the best methods to get around the more restrictive laws.

There were several hundred identical data drives going out every day now, all over the solar system, full-on how-to rebellion manuals, and Maka said that if they fired a thousand arrows at least a few had to hit the mark.

* * *

><p>They were all usually on separate schedules lately, some of them working at night and others in the daytime, but for once they'd all dragged themselves out of bed at roughly the same time- for once, they were all <em>home<em> at the same time. Maka was huddled protectively over a gigantic mug of steaming fake coffee, and she was chugging it pretty damn fast even though she had the cup's temperature control set high enough to make it steam. Soul was flicking slowly through the morning news, even though the holograms were bright enough to make him squint. Stein was still a bit comatose, slumped by the window with half-open eyes and a piece of toast in his hand, Tsubaki and Black Star were munching slowly at some bits of nutri-rations- it sounded like they were chewing cardboard- and Mira was waiting impatiently for Soul to finish with the news.

It was all pretty quiet, so when Soul smacked his palm down on the table and bellowed, "Holy fucking sunspots and solar flares, _look at this_!" they all jumped.

Stein, awake in an instant and furious about that fact, flung his toast directly at Soul's forehead before anybody else could move, but then they all crowded around to read over Soul's shoulder, elbowing and fighting.

"Oh, wow," Maka said, a bit blankly.

The headline read in big, dark, crisp letters: 'Fletcher Activity Skyrockets Here At Home: What's Next?'

"Yeah, wow," Black Star agreed, waving a hand disbelievingly through the letters; everyone, trying to read the article, shouted at him.

"Took 'em long enough to sit up at take notice," Stein commented, once they'd all read and discussed.

"Not _that_ long considering Imperium controls the media," Mira said airily, looking more than a little devious.

Soul was busy staring at Maka, who was looking not only devious but not quite like the Maka he knew. She was reading the headline again, and she was smiling. It was terrible and gorgeous.

Just then- at the perfect moment to make everybody jump- a knock came at the door, four quick raps, three extra-loud, and then one gentle tap. Mira reached out and flipped on the cracked old one-way door screen.

"Colonist," she told everyone, after a glance at the tattered, nervous-looking man outside. "I know him." She turned the screen off, let the man in and re-locked the door.

He got to the point right away, though not without a rather hunted glance all round the crowded room. "I hear you're giving away things to help with poor oxygen levels."

Maka exchanged a glance with Mira, and then for the first time, she stood up and took charge. Mira watched with a funny, almost sad little smile. Apparently Maka wasn't content any longer to run errands and sit in the background modifying the plans of _others_. "We are. We'll also tell you what crops to plant to make the soil more hospitable, too, and what medications can help offset common health problems that come with a poor atmosphere. Come on, I've got some data for you in the other room." Just like that, something shifted, and everybody turned almost as one to stare at the headline again.

"Well, hell," said Soul passionately, leaping to his feet before he meant to do anything at all, staring after Maka as she left like she had his heart on a leash. "Here we go. Can't turn around now even if we wanted."

"Captain doesn't know how to turn back anyway," Black Star said staunchly before swiping a hand through the headline again, scattering it just for a moment into a staticky smear of shadow.


	8. Chapter Seven

Kid's time in Junction City was not going as he'd thought it would, not at all, and he was irritated to say the absolute least.

It seemed like everything he did nowadays was jinxed. He went to grab breakfast at the army barracks' cafeterium; two hours later, he was seeing stars, speaking in tongues, and ripping his clothes off in front of the entire damn city during nothing less than the annual parade. He went as security for Council Representative Roberts' private meeting with the Gliesean ambassadors, only to find out, to his shock and horror, that she wasn't above threatening their lives to get DNA signatures on their latest version of the treaty- and his fellow soldiers didn't even seem to think the whole fiasco was worth a second glance.

At least she'd gotten caught out, somehow, gotten what she'd deserved, and the Glieseans given a real chance to negotiate fair terms- but that was dangerous thinking. _Fletcher_ thinking, Wes would say with a scowl.

Anyway, the Glieseans were- rightly, Kid thought- as pissed off as organisms almost entirely mineral-based _could _get, which it turned out involved threats of outright war and some metaphorical waving of various nuclear devices, so Roberts had managed to shoot everything all to hell in one evening, no pun intended.

And right now, Kid's lack of luck was holding strong. He was lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and possibly brooding just a little, in an undignified way that wasn't at all suitable for a man of his age, when the lights stuttered and went out.

He sighed, and then, to his absolute surprise, realized he was smiling. The Fletchers were at it again.

He slept just fine in the dark, and though the mysteriously- and very _thoroughly_- sabotaged electrical system still wasn't up and running the next day, they were called for morning drill anyway.

Wes was running some new recruits through terrestrial tank practice on the other half of the field, voice pitched to carry clear over the rumbling machinery. Kid, listening with half an ear, caught, "No, the _brakes, _you moonbrained clod! Or did you think I _wanted_ you to run me over?" and, so sarcastic it practically sizzled, "That's much better. In a battle you'll absolutely have time to get yourself _stuck_! Perfect tactics! Imperium can rest easy now you've enlisted, Cortez!"

Kid couldn't help it, he snorted, earning a stink eye from his own commanding officer, but then he thought suddenly: _Battle_? Forty-one percent of humanity's entire population was enlisted, retired from, supplying, working for, or otherwise affiliated with Imperium's army, but who were they fighting? Who were they practicing for? War with the primitive Kuipers, who had no real formal government and thus no active military- and who had few usable resources on their home planet- or war with the Glieseans, who'd proven time and again that they were a reasonable, generous species?

Humans, though… they couldn't even keep from killing _each other_. In fact other humans were the only thing at all Imperium seemed to be at war with, which made Kid stop dead in his tracks.

The delinquent Lady Luck reappeared just in time; before Kid's commanding officer could notice his misstep and begin to rage, Wes began yelling loud enough to make every single soul in the whole field pause and turn.

Wes' roaring, while amazingly profane, did nothing to stop young Cortez from diving clean out of his tank, which was smoking and rumbling full-speed towards another tank, whose driver managed, after a panicked moment of fumbling with the controls, to get out of the way. The first tank rushed forward as if cheered on by Wes's bellowing, smashing with fine enthusiasm into the side of the nearest storage building, a five-story brick hulk that loomed over the field and had the added, much-loved benefit of giving shade.

Judging by the explosion that rocked the ground and sent Kid staggering, that storage shed appeared to be holding most of Imperium's newest shipment of blaster guns.

Wes almost sounded like he was _singing_ now, he was shouting so fast that all his words blurred into one infuriated roar, and Kid couldn't tell for sure in all the smoke but it looked like he might be pulling his hair out, too. If Cortez was smart he'd be running for his life.

"Sabotage!" someone stage-whispered, and then other voices in the crowd picked it up.

"Who'd want to sabotage the Imperium?" another soldier said. Someone laughed at that, scornfully, and Kid joined in.

* * *

><p>"So. Everybody checked their equipment?" Maka added a stern finger shake for emphasis; the rebellion was hideously underfunded, to put it mildly, and their rusty old black-market blaster guns had an unfortunate tendency to break at unfortunate moments.<p>

Everybody nodded obediently, though she caught Black Star rolling his eyes with fine drama. "Okay. So you've all got your assignments. Good luck tonight. Stay _safe_ and do as much damage as you can, oh, and don't forget to report back when you're finished- keep those intercoms we gave you in one piece, because we can't have all of you coming back here at once and leading Imp right to us, but we want to know you're alive. Got it?"

A low murmur of assent swept the room. Maka smiled at everyone. The basement deep below Mira's mechanic shop- a very old Imperium warehouse, actually, that she'd gotten the deed to somehow and then renovated with iron walls a foot thick- was packed to the gills with rebels, the loyal ones who'd already gone on a few smaller missions for the cause. There were quite a lot of young people in the crowd, most of whom looked alternately excited and about to puke, but there were grizzled veterans, too, and even a few old folk, brittle but with the same fire in their eyes.

Three Kuipers lurked in the back, all six clawed paws making soft scritching noises on the floor as they shifted, their lurid, furry eyespots growing and shrinking in what was probably nervousness; they'd volunteered, and though Maka had wondered how they'd found out, she'd accepted them with open arms. They were big ones, probably a few hundred years old, algae and moss growing delicately all over their bodies in cascading green dreadlocks, and four hundred pounds of toothy Kuiper was nothing to sneeze at.

The Fletchers would take them all. They couldn't afford to turn a single soul away. Right now there were twenty other meetings just like this going on, across the entire intricate nightmare of Junction City, but they were still outnumbered a thousand to one.

Well, Maka had never been one to pay much attention to odds, scientist or not. She raised a fist suddenly, impulsively, and shook it at the ceiling. "Fuck Imperium right into the sun," she shouted. Soul, waiting a little ways behind her in the shadows as if he thought she might fall right off the hoverchair she was standing on, gave a muffled snort, and she felt vaguely ridiculous.

It seemed to improve the mood a bit, though. People laughed, and quite a few other fists went into the air as they all trickled out slowly, in staggered ones and twos, blending drop by drop into the seething mass of rush-hour humanity outside.

The basement took a long time to empty. Two hours later, Maka and Soul were the last to leave, and she stood on the cold street watching her breath plume out pale in front of her, a tiny exhaled ghost, as he locked up the basement and discreetly armed the completely illegal security system.

"Well," she said, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him in for a quick, ferocious kiss, "Here we go."

"Yup," he said, squeezing her hand quickly before letting go. She glanced around as he disappeared into the crowd, then pulled her scrambler mask over her face. It was itchy and the canvas lining felt rough and clammy against her skin, but it was carefully designed to thwart any facial recognition technology by breaking up the shadows and shapes of her face..

Her ID picture- taken ten years ago, but still recognizable- had been in the papers that morning. Imperium had finally connected the dots and remembered her little adventure on Tethys.

So she wore the mask despite how damn _annoying _it was, letting the asymmetrical black stripes and squares mixed with slowly rotating white and red lights confuse the cameras that blinked on each corner. It was worth it.

It did give her a bit of a headache, though, which she just _maybe _took out on the two unlucky Imperium officials who were busy slashing the city's budget for free healthcare from tiny to nothing. They ended up sitting on their office floor bound, gagged, _and _naked instead of simply bound and gagged like she'd originally planned.

Their fine, warm Imperium-blue jumpsuits- _real _cotton, no less, not a synthetic fiber in the whole damn things- she gave away to a trio of hungry looking young women lurking outside the back door of a restaurant. They were more likely to sell the things than wear them, but they'd get a good bit of cash for such nice clothing, and they didn't look like druggies. Maka checked, too, before giving them the suits, hearing Stein's skeptical voice in her head.

But their eyes were clear and the veins on their thin wrists showed pale blue-green instead of the awful dirty silver that came with smoking bliss tar- the cheapest drug out there to make, and therefore the most common by far, at least in Junction City. Anyway, they were all blonde, and she found herself wistfully reminded of Liz and Patti, so when the youngest girl squealed and gave her an impulsive hug, Maka didn't resist.

She was humming as she walked home, the highly classified drive full of passcodes and data she'd stolen tucked securely into her vest's inner pocket, and when she finally slipped inside Mira's home via the lone back door, which was masquerading as an especially filthy dumpster, she sighed in relief. Her face was sweaty and it felt like she'd maybe gotten a burn on her nose from the wiring to the lights. It took a fair bit of willpower to hang the mask up instead of chucking it into the wall.

Mira was returned from whatever bit of mischief she'd been assigned, kicked back with her bare feet propped on the wobbly table and one ear aimed at the staticky old radio.

"Hey," Maka said, pulling out a chair and slumping down beside her.

"Hi, chickadee," Mira said absently, peering at the tablet in her lap and marking something off. As if on cue, it made a suspicious whirring noise until she banged on it a few times. "We've gotten seventy-two people checking in. Uh, forty-three still to go."

"Well, there's plenty of time. Some of those assignments might not be done until morning."

"Mm. Oh, and Leilsson-" Mira's voice darkened and her toes began to wriggle irritably. "Caught him trying to get the passcodes to our southern storage shed from Tsubaki. He's been taken care of."

"Oh," Maka said, rather numbly. She'd liked Leilsson. He was, or had been, a skinny little dark-eyed guy with a strange fondness for oversize hats. But he wasn't the first traitor they'd caught. Far too many people fell to the temptation of selling out the Fletchers in hopes of getting rewarded by the Imperium, and one person could conceivably bring down the entire rebellion, so- on Mira's orders, and Steins, and, reluctantly, Maka's- they'd been brutal in weeding out their various Judases.

It was a good thing, actually, that the local den of Kuipers was firmly on their side. Poor humans would sometimes eat the Kuipers, but Kuipers had very advanced digestive systems that could dissolve steel, and they didn't at all mind eating _humans_ if it were for a good cause, right down to the bones.

"You're shivering," Mira said, adjusting the radio dial just a little as someone named Maren checked in after a successful mission.

Maka put her head down on the table. "Sorry."

"Go put on a damn sweater," Mira ordered, maternal and prickly all at once; Maka laughed and complied, pulling on an old green thing that was Soul's. The sleeves came clear down over her hands, and she rolled them up as she made weak tea for herself and Mira.

It grew cold as they waited. Black Star arrived home, and Tsubaki close behind, and Stein last of all, looking rather manic on adrenaline and with some bright new bloodstains on his lab coat, which hadn't a square inch of its original color left.

"He'll be home anytime," Tsubaki said soothingly, when it was past midnight and Soul still hadn't returned. "He had to go clear over by the biodomes, and that's a long walk."

"Duh," Black Star said, giving a fine imitation of carefree; only the tap-tap-tap of his fingers on the table gave him away. Maka took a sip of her cold tea, grimaced, drank it anyway because real tea was an expensive luxury, and tried very hard not to glance at her wrist-comp's clock.

When someone knocked at the front door, they all jumped, and Mira spilled what was left of her tea with a curse before diving for the one-way door viewer and flicking it on. Soul peered back at them on the screen from behind a messy fringe of red-stained bangs. "Can you let me in, please," he said hoarsely, and he nearly fell through the door into Maka's arms when Mira opened it.

"Oh my _god_," Maka said frantically, pulling and clutching at him, her feet skidding under his weight on the cement floor. Black Star leapt to Soul's other side, and together they got him over to the table and into one of the chairs.

He slumped over, teeth gritted, and said while white-knuckling the edge of his seat, "I think they broke a few of my ribs."

"Well, stop bleeding on the floor, you'll stain the concrete," Stein told him practically, pulling a rag out of nowhere and plastering it to Soul's split lip with one hand, poking busily at his ribs with the other.

"Ow! Fucking hell!" Soul snarled, flailing and kicking and flicking droplets of scarlet all over the room; Maka felt one land on her cheek and had to close her eyes to keep from sinking to her knees. Her bones felt raw and splintery inside her crawling skin.

"What happened?" she said once she'd recovered herself, taking the rag from Stein, wetting it in the rusted utility sink, and bending down to wipe Soul's face, pushing his sticky bangs gently away.

His ears were literally vibrating, and his dilated eyes were both furious and scared. He slid a bruised hand discreetly around to grip the back of Maka's knee and said, a tad thickly because of his swelling lip, "Someone saw my teeth, called me genmod scum. The usual. I didn't realize they were _following _me, and I didn't want them to take the petri dishes, and it- they got the stupid samples off me, okay, we'll have to rob some other Imp lab." He was positively hissing by the time he finished, and also going a little white and sweaty as the rush of danger wore off.

Maka gripped the back of his neck and gave a tiny comforting shake, then slid her fingers up into his hair. "Did they reference the rebellion at all?"

"No." He glanced at her, a flash of hunted red, and she nearly cried. That beautiful bloody color, and golden skin like the warm glow of hot engines- he was otherwordly, a fallen angel, he was _perfect _and she'd thought so since the first moment she saw him, back when she still believed he was a fairytale come to life and that her mama and papa were just on a trip somewhere. But people still thought he'd genetically modified himself, and they still kicked the hell out of him for it, just because they could, because it was strange, and he- scrapper to the end, and he was fighting _her _fight now- always hit back.

She couldn't breathe until the hand he had around her leg tightened. "I'm okay, Maka, I'm just pissed off."

"Pissed off with perfectly intact ribs," Stein chirped gaily, scrubbing a hand over Soul's hair like he was twelve again. His tone was light, but his gaze was somber. "But you'll need a few _stitches!" _Tsubaki sighed softly and turned to rummage in the cabinets, pulling out a bottle of vivid blue Cellgro.

"Don't sound so pleased about it," Soul protested, blanching; it was futile, and Stein descended with eyes glinting as bright as his needle.

* * *

><p><em>Maka was curious, but she was always curious, to a maddening degree. Westing would've thought her insane if not for the fact that his little brother had been just the same at age eight, getting into absolutely everything and anything and asking the most awkward, nosy questions imaginable. <em>

_So when she came wandering up and tugged on his hand to ask, yet again, how aliens talked, he humored her. He was a teenager now, very grown up and responsible- and every day he felt the weight of the future and four mouths to feed pressing down on him- but sometimes it was nice to focus on something less terrifying for a while._

"_Well," he began, watching as she straightened her pigtails carefully. Soul'd been doing her hair every morning since they woke up on this ship, but despite his intense insistence on doing it by himself, he seemed to be limited to messy braids, pigtails, and the occasional crooked ponytail. "You've heard me and Soul talking. Singing."_

_She nodded solemnly. "Yes. But I want to learn how to speak Kuiper, or Gliesean, or something, so I can trade with them when I'm older and go learn about them!"_

_Wes very carefully did not laugh at her tiny dreams. Instead he stroked a pigtail and said gently, "Oh? Well, I can speak a little Gliesean. So can Soul. They lived on the planet with us for a while, you know, before everyone got sick."_

"_The planet where my parents and Stein found you sleeping?" she asked carefully._

_He suppressed the old, panicked pain and nodded. "Yes. So if you want, I'll teach you a little, but you've got to promise to work hard, okay?"_

_She pondered that. He noticed, with a twinge, that her trousers were getting short, and she was barefoot again, which meant her shoes were pinching her toes but she didn't want to say anything. "Can Soul help me too?" she said finally, peering up at him very seriously with those big green eyes. "He speaks it too, right?"_

"_Yes."_

"_Okay, then." She stuck her hand out._

_He blinked at it. "Uh, what…?"_

"_You're suppose to shake on a deal." She grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down three times, little chest puffed out and looking very official and important._

_He grinned at her, delighting in how wide her eyes got as she stared at his jagged teeth- even after four years of knowing him, she still thought his and Soul's teeth to be just the coolest thing this side of the sun. "Ah, okay. Must be one of those human things."_

_She frowned a little at that. "You are human."_

_He kept smiling for her. _

* * *

><p>Soul woke up to dull, aching pain and said to the drab ceiling, "Ow."<p>

Maka's head was off his chest in an instant as she peered at him. "How do you feel? Are you okay? Did your stitches tear? They'll be out in three days, that's not bad, but what about your ribs?"

"Take it easy," he managed. "Damn, it's no wonder hardly anybody does stitches any more, they fucking _hurt."_

She cringed. "I'm sorry!"

"Huh? Why?"

"Because this is my fault, idiot, I'm the one who got you tangled up in this-" He glared at her, and she sighed, wilting back down to nestle in the curve of his arm. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be all dramatic and make this about me when you're the one hurt. I just… you scared me."

She _did_ look scared, even after he'd slept for nine hours without bursting into flames or spontaneously dying. There were murky violet smudges beneath her reddened eyes, and she'd been chewing on her lip again. "Love you," he said after a moment.

"Love you too." She kissed his nose, very gently because he'd been punched in it at least once last night. "How's all your bits feeling?"

"My bits, eh?" he snickered, feeling marginally more alive. "You could check for yourself, you know, and- ow! Don't pinch me, I'm injured!"

"I pinched an un-bruised bit," she informed him haughtily. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yeeeeeeeeees!"

"Okay, okay, sunspots, I was just _asking_."

"I know." He returned the favor and kissed her nose, then her cheeks, then her forehead. "You worry. It coulda happened to any of us, though." She rose up on one elbow to watch him, pushing his hair carefully back from his face with her other hand. "Maka, you know there'll be costs to this fight. Right? It could take years and years to make any real difference."

Now it was her turn to say, "I know. I do. Doesn't make me worry about you any less."

"I'd be a little offended if you weren't worried, honestly."

"Ha. Idiot."

"Whatever." He settled back with a yawn and they drowsed for a few minutes before his racing brain got the best of him and he said, "Hey, sweetheart. Things are going as you wanted, right?"

He couldn't see her face from this angle, but he felt her eyelashes feather against his neck. "What do you mean?"

"I mean… I even heard the movement's spreading. It's working, the data drives we gave to the colonists… The big mine on Dysnomia. Got blown up a few weeks ago. Totally collapsed, and the miners are striking. Black Star and I were reading it in the paper before the missions..."

"No more easy fuel monopolies for the rich," Maka joked. The skin around her mouth was tight and tense.

Soul reached up to twirl a finger in her loose golden hair. "Yeah. It's spreading, though, it's becoming more than it was. Because of you, I think. You've been pushing people, you… it's what you wanted. You gave people hope. " She'd taken a rag-tag, flatlining cause and bound it with steel cables, woven together thousands of people all across the solar system into a tapestry of fight and determination and practicality. If he hadn't already seen what she was capable of, if he hadn't watched her tiny toddler hands wipe crusted blood and pus off Stein as he raved in the aftermath of his injuries, if he hadn't seen her bring a barren moon from lifeless dust to lavish greenery, he'd never have believed one woman could make such a difference, but she had.

"That's the problem," she whispered at last. I've done all I can here in Junction City. The ball's rolling. People know how to do what they need, we're getting more and more fighters every day, more scientists and mechanics, everything we need… but everywhere _else _needs the same help." There was longing in her voice, hot and wild, when she said, "I've got to get back to space, help the far moons."

Soul closed his eyes. Damn her and her musical pulse and her infinite eyes, damn her for trapping him so neatly. If he didn't love her so fiercely he sometimes thought he'd hate her. "No good sabotaging Imperium here in Junction City if they can keep bringing in ships and soldiers and resources to replace everything we break, huh?"

"Yeahhhh." Her tone said there was more coming.

Soul grunted, peeled his scratchy eyelids open with great effort, wriggled his ears briefly out of habit to check on the breathing of everybody in the adjoining rooms- Black Star was snoring hilariously in tiny, squeaky little kitten-sounds, and Tsubaki was practically shaking the walls- and said, with a swooping inner sensation of dread, "What're you trying to tell me?"

She slid cold fingers across his stomach. "I need a ship," she breathed. "A fast ship."

Soul didn't fall back asleep after that.

* * *

><p>Mira was <em>staring,<em> and Maka could feel that electric-blue gaze like a drill into her frontal lobe. She growled into her tea and said finally, "Did you want something?"

"You've got itchy feet, girl," said Mira, getting right to the point. She took a noisy slurp of her own tea as if to punctuate her point and then added slyly, "Heard the other day from a little songbird that you've got a craving to be Captain again."

Maka squinted at her, eyebrows shooting up. Soul and his big mouth, and his _meddling _ways- the man was worse than a bored grandmother. "Oh yeah?"

"Mmhmm. A fast one. One the Imperium can't catch, one they won't track at first. Nothing with a past, I'm guessing… Though it'd be easier to just _smuggle _you off the planet if you wanna spread the good news."

Maka grimaced and wrapped both hands more firmly around her cup, trying to soak in the warmth; she always felt chilly these days, and fearful, like Junction City's acid rain and constant, bitter fog had crept into her heart. "I know, I thought about that, but there's too much I'll need to bring with me to really help. We've got everything we took from the _Bullseye's_ hold, all Stein's plant strains-" His carnivorous vines were currently creeping all along the baseboards of Mira's cramped apartment, snapping at anyone who came impertinently close- "And all our bacteria samples, the vaccines, my moss spores, all my 'forming tech, I've got two tons of it rusting in that damn storage unit, and I need it. So it also follows that I need a ship."

Mira hummed, then set down her tea with a clink and twisted her dreadlocks into a thick knot at the back of her head. She stared at the big crack in the southern wall for a long time, where the ancient drywall sometimes cracked under the force of the shifting city above them and drifted down to powder the floor. Everybody always tracked it around the place in ghostly white footprints. "You're stubborn, just like your mama was," Mira said at last, voice unusually soft. "Look where she ended up."

Maka's teacup hit the cracked wall and shattered; more drywall dust filtered down. She was on her feet before she knew it, panting with rage and hurt. "You do _not _get to speak about my parents!" she choked.

Mira shook her head sadly at the shards of teacup. "Why not? They were my friends too. And I'll thank you not to break my stuff. I don't have much." She shot Maka a level look. "I've spent all my savings helping the rebellion, and good porcelain's hard to come by these days."

"I- I'm sorry." Maka sat back down, then leapt up abruptly and started picking up bits of teacup. "I'm sorry. It's not an excuse, or at least not a good one, but you're right, I'm going _crazy _being stuck here. All I can think about is getting back in the sky, about all the things that need to be done still in other places, I'm losing my _mind._"

Mira nodded wisely. "Lost mine somewhere a long time ago. Stein tells me I musta left it in someone's ship by accident, swapped my brain for a bit of fuselage and forgot to notice…"

It was so ridiculous that Maka had to laugh, kneeling there in a goopy mixture of wall dust and tea, palms cupping jagged bits of one of Mira's last cups. "I'm so sorry," she said again, sheepishly, once she'd recovered.

"S'alright, I break things too, sometimes not even when I'm mad," Mira said airily, lips twitching. "Listen, though, on a more serious note-"

"My gratuitous tantrums and destruction of your property isn't serious?"

"Ha. If you want, I know some people."

Maka paused at that, then said, "People?"

"People who just might be able to find you a cheap ship. Might be able to work a deal with 'em, my name's got some pull in these parts, especially in the cruiser scene, I've worked on most of them… I've got some spendy engine bits I've been saving we could put up for trade, too. It's worth it. We've _got _to ride this wave all the way to the finish."

"You-" For once in Maka's life, words failed her, and she was reduced to goggling at Mira with her jaw opening and closing silently like a fish. "You-"

Mira smirked and took an incredibly smug sip of tea, smacking her lips at the finish. "Ahhhhh. So? How 'bout it, _Captain_? You up to spreading a little dangerous Fletcher propaganda?"

Maka squeaked once, flung herself at Mira and nearly broke the other teacup, and said fervently, madly, shaking all over, "Yes! Yes, please, oh god, get us a _ship!"_


	9. Chapter Eight And Epilogue

Later, when their missions were done, when everything was dark and quiet and the danger was, for the moment, over, Soul held her tight in his arms and stroked lazy fingers up her delicate spine, trying absently to think of a song he'd forgotten long ago. "What about the innocents?"

"What?" she murmured, tired to the bones and still trembling occasionally from the after-effects of a stray stunner-blast she'd caught in the back during her mission.

"I mean… not _all _the people tied to Imperium are these evil monsters, you know. A lot of them are just people trying to feed their families, clerks or whatever. They're pretty much forced to work for Imperium, it's the only employer out there. What about those people?"

She sighed, wriggling closer, and he shivered when her breath gusted across his throat. "War always takes innocents. It always has and it always will, but my people here know to save lives whenever possible. You've _heard_ me tell them that, you watched Tsubaki teach all those classes on where to shoot someone without it being fatal, you- why are you bringing this up now?"

He put his lips against her forehead for a moment, like a benediction. "I don't know. I know it's no good at this point, but I just… What we're doing is right. Mostly, anyway. I know that. But I can't shake this bad feeling."

She said quietly, "If you didn't love me so much, you'd ask me to stop, wouldn't you? To run from all this?"

Soul stared into the darkness. She knew him so damn well. She knew that he'd follow where she led, but that he'd never wanted all this. Soul had no problem with heroism, but he'd be just as happy with only a little ship, the open sky, and Maka; but those things would never satisfy _her_, as painful as it was to admit. If she weren't ablaze, she was slowly dying. "If I didn't love you so much, yes. I'd be selfish. But I do."

* * *

><p>The next morning over a scant breakfast, with the distant sound of heavy-footed patrols audible even through the walls, he stared at the news for a long time, until when he closed his eyes he could still see the glowing letters. They hadn't made the front headline, but they weren't far from it, either.<p>

'Fletcher Criminals Grow Bolder' was the main text, and below that, next to a crisp holophoto of the most of the current fifty-one council members, all looking dour and well-fed, 'How Much Have They Already Cost Our City? Fear Widespread In the Streets. Imperium Council Swears to Protect Citizens.' What bullshit propaganda, but then all public media was in Imperium's pocket somehow, and they had been for a _very _long time.

Maka noticed it then, probably because he'd practically stopped breathing, and looked up from her watery fake oatmeal with raised eyebrows to read the projected headline. "Oh, wow." The bruise on her cheek- courtesy of the same soldier who'd hit her last night with the stunner blast- looked lurid in the hologram's gently pulsing glow.

They stared at each other for a long moment, both thinking about the twenty-two Fletchers who hadn't come home last night, and then he gritted his teeth and switched off the news projector.

* * *

><p>Mira's eyes were glinting electrically and sparks still skittered across her skin from the bowels of the spaceship in her shop that she'd just come in from working on. "Maka," was all she said.<p>

It was enough. "You found me a ship," Maka said, shocked, nearly dropping the crate of seedlings she was lugging.

Mira gave a little half-smile and wiped some grease off her face, adding more to her cheek in the process. "Yup. It's only available for a short time, though. The seller's black market, and he's a greedy old bastard, but he's trustworthy enough."

"You sure?"

"Yeah. I've worked with him before, and he'll skin you alive and sell it for leather before you even realize it, but he hates Imperium as much as anybody. Doesn't like to be taxed, heh. I think we can make it work."

"Sunspots… Mira, you're a queen," Maka said breathlessly, doing a shuffling sort of dance under the weight of the crate and grinning madly. "I know _exactly_ what planet I'm going to first!" Patti and Liz were undoubtedly up to trouble where she'd left them; by now those two smiling troublemakers would undoubtedly know all Orcus' weak points.

"I know," Mira said modestly, lips twitching.

Soul, who'd been out since the early morning helping Stein administer medicine to the poorer parts of town- which meant it was pain medication to gentle the miserable end, since death came swift and relentless in the rodent-infested slums- came shambling in an hour later looking dark.

Maka flew at him. "We're going to get the ship tonight! It's tonight! We're leaving tonight, Soul, oh god, stars and spirits, we're getting off this planet! And quite a few volunteers want to come, so we're taking just a bit under full capacity, after cargo weight, of course, but we'll be free!"

He actually stepped back, sharp teeth glinting. "What? Already?"

"Yes!" she crowed, hopping around and being uncharacteristically quite careless of the virus sample she still had in one hand. He took it from her and set it gently down on the wobbly workbench, then gripped her by the upper arms. The little apartment was empty but for them now, Mira back in her workshop next door and everyone else out doing something or other, and she stilled as his overloud breathing filled the room. "Soul? You wanted this, didn't you? After I got the other ship taken-"

"You silly woman. You never owed me anything," he muttered, rather pale. "We're in this together, remember, that means the crappy bits too. But Maka- Maka-"

He couldn't get anything else out. She read fear in his face, but before she could say anything else, he yanked her close and kissed her hard, almost frantically.

It tasted like desperation, but it still made her shiver and burn. One of his teeth pricked her lip, and she retaliated by breaking the kiss to put her own teeth on his hot neck, their hands everywhere. He groaned and ripped her lab coat open hard enough to send a button flying, and she ripped his shirt off just as roughly.

He shoved her trousers down her thighs and put a hand between her legs, crooning heated nothings between kisses; Maka leaned back shakily against the work table, spreading her legs further for him and lifting one hand to pinch her nipple.

Soul caught the extra note in her whimpering and lifted his face out of her hair in an instant, smacking her hand away and bending to her breast, breath hot and tongue hotter. The microscopes behind her rattled and the table creaked dangerously; neither noticed in the slightest.

She didn't even try to be quiet. On the contrary, she closed her eyes and buried her face against his neck, clutching his broad shoulders when it felt like she might implode, and whispered everything and anything to him, let him hear exactly what he did to her. She came crying his name.

They eventually regained enough presence of mind to retreat to their closet-slash-bedroom, and they lay together in a sweaty, languid tangle beneath her lab coat. She didn't say anything, didn't ask what had prompted such a sudden fit of passion.

"I'm gonna come with you tonight," he said after a while. "Bad feelin's back."

She smiled and was glad the room was too dark for him to see her damp eyes. "It's not the end, silly, but fine, come along and help us load it up. We'll buy it, fill it up, and be safe out of the atmosphere by nightfall."

* * *

><p>The ship had a few more new parts than the <em>Bullseye<em>'d had, but they were internal, and you'd never guess from looking at it. The hull was dangerously battered, but it would last at least a few more blazing descents through an atmosphere before it really needed repairs, and the rust was ugly, but not yet a functional problem.

"Well, it'll fly," was Black Star's surprisingly diplomatic final assessment. He had what Tsubaki had dubbed his 'war face' on, that stern clench-jawed look of steel. Funnily enough, Tsubaki's expression was much the same as she carefully inspected the ship by his side, though she didn't seem to notice.

"You didn't mention the tanks are so small," Mira pointed out, arms crossed. Somewhere behind her came a dank dripping sound; these docks were ancient, practically abandoned, and the city had grown up around them like an enthusiastic fungus, until the only route to the sky was an awkward and unsafe tunnel straight upwards. Of course that was why the ship'd been stashed here, but still. It probably explained the rust.

The man selling them the ship snorted and spat out what sounded like a fair bit of his lung. "Look, lady, do you want it or not? Because Imp'll take it for parts and get it off my hands just as well."

Maka sighed, drew Mira aside, and they conferred for a few minutes. All the while, Maka was aware of Soul's stare. Finally they went back and shook hands with the man, who oozed away happily counting his cash and trying to find some friends to help him carry away the engine parts Mira had traded, and an unfortunately large portion of Maka's cargo- but it had been unavoidable, and all the cargo in the world was no good if they couldn't get it to the colonies.

"Well, let's load her up," Maka proclaimed happily, fists on her hips and finally feeling like a captain again; it was ruined when a drop of icy water from the busted pipe waterfalling ten stories above them slipped down the back of her shirt and made her yelp.

It took the rest of the day to get the new ship loaded up. They had to carry rations for the twenty-odd Fletchers who'd volunteered to come along, and even with those people all helping, three thousand pounds of cargo was nothing that could be moved in a few minutes, especially since most of it was stashed back at Mira's shop or in the tiny storage unit Maka'd managed to get when they lost the _Bullseye._

Not to mention to usual collateral damage courtesy of Black Star, but he tempered himself a tad when he noticed Piccadilly's trembling hands.

They couldn't simply walk through the streets carrying crates of foodstuffs and illegal contraband, either, so they had to transport everything on three very old hoverlifts that Mira usually kept in her mechanic shop for moving heavier ship's parts. The things were temperamental and constantly complaining via puffs of toxic black smoke and ominous creaking noises as Maka and her new crew guided them through the back streets, but it worked; they simply looked like merchants, and nobody bothered them, though a few Kuipers did follow them for three tense blocks. They probably could have come up with some excuse if caught, but they needed to stay absolutely secret until the moment of their takeoff; Imperium was patrolling the streets in higher numbers than ever, and the old ship probably wasn't spry enough to outrun a brand-new Imperium ship. They'd need to launch quickly, to get a headstart, so for now they kept everything carefully quiet.

But when darkness fell over Junction City, they were ready.

The stars were sparkling and white in the void above them as they embraced Mira, back at her shop, for the last time, and the gracious moon was full enough to give them plenty of light as they crept along grimy alleys to the old docks and their new ship. It painted Soul's hair glowing starlight white, and brought out the warlike light in Tsubaki's eyes as they slipped all together through the city.

Black Star lifted his boot out of an unidentifiable puddle, grimaced, and said in a low voice, "Captain. What're you gonna name this one?"

"I'm not sure yet," she said honestly, trying yet again not to miss the _Bullseye. _"It'll come to me, though. It always does."

"Can _I _name it-"

"No!"

He scowled, flipped her off, dodged her answering cuff, and nearly fell in the mysterious puddle.

The docks were quiet, blessedly, and they filed into the ship without discovery. Maka checked her Fletcher troops, patted a swooning and sweating Piccadilly fondly on the head, reassured everybody else, and went to join Soul in the cockpit.

He was sitting on a wadded-up towel; the bucket seat had very little _seat_ left. She smothered a laugh at his disgruntled expression and, watching him idly flick switches here and there, familiarizing himself with the older model, asked, "So?"

"It's a literal bucket of bolts," he muttered, brows drawn. "But it'll do."

They looked at each other for a long moment; then she smiled at him and said, "All right, then. No time like the present, pilot mine."

He touched a warm finger to the tender inside of her wrist, his searching scarlet eyes very wide and reflecting all the multicolored rainbow dials, then he got down to business and began to boot up the ship in earnest. It came to life with a surprisingly enthusiastic rumble; he laughed.

"Guess the old gal's got some life in her yet."

"You keep talking like that, you'll be patting the dash and calling her 'Ol Bessie' before you know it," she warned, chuckling. Still, she triple-checked the radio on her hip, making sure it was on; Black Star and Tsubaki had the others, and they were posted by the cargo hold door and the other external cam's viewscreens, respectively, ready to warn her if trouble came calling.

Ten taut minutes later, in which Maka nearly dehydrated herself via nervous sweating, Soul swiveled to face her and said, "Ready for takeoff, captain."

She bent to peer at the sky scanner again. "Imperium scout ships?"

"They'll be out of the way in twenty-eight minutes, forty-eight seconds. To slip through without collision we've got to take off in about twelve."

"All right." She puffed out a tense breath and reached for his hand, the one that wasn't white-knuckling the wheel, and together they watched the timer he'd set count down on the screen, big blue numbers whirring away as the engines roared and shook.

Stein's voice crackled from the radio; probably he'd tackled Black Star for possession. "All right, kiddos! Here we go!"

Soul laughed wildly, barely blinking as he stared at the timer. "Yeah, just about."

She looked at him, then lifted his hand to kiss the back of it. "Thank you."

He tore his eyes away from his screens long enough to raise an eyebrow. "For what?"

"For everything, you idiot," she teased, lips twitching. "I love you."

"You too," he said, rolling his eyes dramatically; she snorted and squeezed his hand until she felt the bones rub.

She was about ready to buckle safely into the copilot's chair for takeoff when the radio sounded again. "Maka," said Tsubaki, sounding breathless. "We've got Imp cruisers on the docks. We're surrounded."

"_Fuck!_" Maka tore her hand from Soul's grip and sprinted through the ship, until the metal catwalks rattled and rang, echoing in a frantic clamor all around her.

She blew past Tsubaki and out the smaller cargo hold hatch just in time to see the shining blue Imperium mini-cruisers hovering above and around, blocking out the patch of night sky above, each only an eighth of the size of her ship but more than enough to provide a very serious blockade. A damaged ship meant sure death in the merciless vacuum of space.

Her ship was flaming and ready, spitting super-heated licks of red and white within the dock's carbon shell that cupped its thrusters. Soul was keeping it faithfully ready to go, then, but she'd have to make this damned quick or they'd burn through too much of their limited fuel.

She slammed the door in Tsubaki's face, keeping her inside and safe, and put her hands up, gritting her teeth as a searchlight burned her eyes. "What's all this about?" she shouted above the roar of the cruisers.

A ring of Imperium soldiers stepped closer, emerging from the shadows, all of them with raised blasters trained directly on her. There were at least two score of them, and her mouth went dry. Their commander was a rather short man, carrying his blaster gun with deadly ease, and he raked his tired dark eyes across her when he stepped forward as if he'd never cared about anything at all.

She opened her mouth to say something, to scare them off or just threaten them, _anything _to get their goddamn cruisers out of her way, but then she recognized him and breathed in disbelief, "_Westing."_

He froze completely, gaze snapping back to her face, and then he went pale beneath his beautiful golden skin. "Maka?" He hadn't recognized her until she spoke.

The cruisers were overpowered, and the screaming wind of them was whipping her hair all about, into her face, but she didn't seem to be able to move either. "Wes," she said brokenly, stuck on his name, on the sheer improbability of seeing him now, after so many years, wearing blue. His jaw had dropped as he stared at her, and the teeth she glimpsed were white and even. His hair was a pale blonde-brown now too, it was _wrong, _and his face haunted, so much older, written with so much pain that she nearly doubled over. "Oh, Wes, you joined Imperium? This is why you left us? Your family?"

It was the wrong thing to say. He stiffened. "You took my _ship," _he snarled, taking a step closer, blaster gun shining in the roving spotlights. "We were fa- we survived alone in space as _children_, I was the one who took care of you and Soul when Stein couldn't! I didn't _leave_, you fucking drove me away! Hell, I'm the one who dragged your rotting fucking parents off the ship before we all got sick, and you- you all made me _leave! _I never wanted to! I was trying to _help! _How could you do this? How could you be the one behind all this goddamn Fletcher nonsense?"

By the end he was screaming at her, and she'd given up any pretense of cooperative amiability to drop one hand to her own blaster. "Who told you we'd be here?" she hissed, enraged beyond all belief, bristling like an angry cat. "And it was never your ship, asshole, it was _mine!"_

He laughed bitterly, uncaring of the uneasy shifting of his soldiers behind him. One dark-haired, slender man with keen yellowish eyes had actually let his gun fall and was shaking his head. "Does it matter? There are millions of people in Junction City, did you really think they'd all support you? Imperium helps a lot of people. You always were naive, though." When she bared her teeth at him, he added sharply, "Why d'you think I wanted to sell that damn ship? So we'd have a proper home, but no, you and my brother had to go roaming around the stars!"

She was clenching her jaw so hard that it hurt. In her wildest dreams she'd never imagined her Westing, who'd given her piggy-back rides and stroked her hair when she was sick, who'd sung while he made dinner and who'd held Stein down with gentle hands while he raved in the throes of a healing fever, would have ended up like this. "Get the fuck out of my way or I swear to god I'll tell Soul to run your men down," she snapped, hand tightening on her gun. The odds were that the soldiers in those cruisers would give in and get out of the way when faced with a sure, fiery death thundering up at them.

Probably. If they didn't, though… and there were so many lives on that ship right now.

Wes took another step towards her, hair flying madly in the whipping winds, and she saw with agonizing shock that his cheeks were damp. "I can't! I can't, Maka, I can't, I- you're fighting destiny, Maka, and why? Imperium runs things as smoothly as we can, and it's not perfect, but it's necessary. Happy daydreams of equality and justices don't hold up when it comes to actually having billions of mouths to feed. There's no other way."

"You could refrain from sending colonists to the moons until the damn places can actually support long-term life!" she spat, shaking, nearly blind with fury. "Do you really think that never occurred to the Council? But they want the income colonists provide and they don't give a shit if it means people die young! And the way you've fucked up alien relations, all for _profit!"_

He looked genuinely appalled. "It's not like that! Imperium wants to unite the solar system under peaceful rule, and that means we need the right resources."

She shook her head and discreetly thumbed her blaster from 'kill' to 'stun'. "You're fighting an enemy that doesn't even exist and ruining countless lives doing so. They're not numbers, Wes, they're _real _people with family and friends and pain-"

Her radio crackled, and Soul's smooth voice poured into her ears. "Wes! Wes, you fucking- Wes! Let me talk to him, Maka!"

She bent her head a little toward the radio, distantly aware of Wes' strained face at hearing his brother. "That's probably not a great idea right now."

Soul hissed loudly enough to be heard quite clearly, and it sounded like he might be hitting the dashboard too. "Can you hurry this up? I've got less than nine minutes burntime left before we _have _to take off, or we'll run out of fuel end up fucking stranded between planets!"

Maka looked at Wes, and all the soldiers fanned out behind him in their armor the color of sorrow, and said grimly into the radio, "Take off at eight minutes exactly, Soul. Head to the place we left Pattie and Liz. Got it?"

A beat, then, "What about you? What are you going to do?"

There were bitter tears in her eyes. "To the end, remember? Trust me."

He said uneasily, "Fine. Hurry up with whatever you've got planned, though." The engines kept burning, throwing off waves of shimmering heat that made the stars above look underwater.

Maka looked at Wes again now, and she raised her voice even as she slid her right foot ever-so-slowly forward. "What good do you think this'll do, anyway? It's not like I'm the leader. The Fletchers are fighting for something bigger than me, and they'll keep fighting. You'd never believe how many of us there are, or how _angry_ we are." She'd managed two steps forward now, and a few more of the soldiers behind Wes looked hesitant. "This isn't a fight you can win, and we might not win either, not right away, but even the littlest victories for our side _help _people. We save lives-" Another step, she was so breathless she could barely speak, and her hands were trembling- "And all you do is take them, Wes! How many people have you murdered because you got an _order _to?"

He flinched, just for a second, but she was close now, and she'd always been fast. She sprang forward, knocked his loosely held blaster out of his hand, and shoved the mouth of her own gun into his temple, looping an arm around his neck.

It was surprisingly quiet in the aftermath; besides the engines and the panicked shuffling of the soldiers, there was only Wes' strained breathing in her ear. How many seconds till Soul had to take off? She gulped air and said sternly, "Move your cruisers out of the way."

"This won't work. They won't-"

"_Move them!" _She clicked her gun back to 'kill' and watched his eyes widen at the familiar sound, so close to his sensitive ears- _those_ weren't so easy to modify.

"Six minutes forty five seconds," came Soul's panicked voice. "Maka-"

"Working on it," she bit off. She was a heartbeat away from starting in on Wes again when a low murmur came from the soldiers, a loud noise, and then the mouthwatering smell of cooked meat.

It took her a second to realize she'd been hit by a stunner blast, and Wes quite competently disarmed and handcuffed her in another moment. He frogmarched her, or rather dragged her, since her legs weren't quite working yet, towards the front curve of the ship, hands soft on her arms.

She was nearly blind, and every nerve in her body was screaming. He said something to his soldiers, and then, quietly into her ear, "It'll be okay. I'll try and get you two light sentences. I have some pull in the City, I can help-"

Maka worked up enough control to toss her head back and smack him in the nose; he only grunted and shoved her forward again, spitting out her hair as it blew every which way in the wailing wind that rose as, confident in their victory, the first cruiser began to lift up and out of the way. What she saw when they rounded the front of her ship sent her sinking to her numb knees, gripped by Wes or not. A slender Imperium war megacruiser had descended, unnoticed in the chaos, to rest beside her ship.

They'd extended all their grappling equipment, and the two ships were bound tight with shimmering blue carbon-fiber ties, nearly unbreakable; what's more, the megacruiser was dark, all the lights off, which meant its crew had abandoned ship, which meant only one thing. The council was serious about stopping the 'Fletcher threat', it seemed.

She shook her head wildly, staggered to her feet and wheeled on Wes, screaming, "Disconnect the ships! Disconnect them! You'll blow this whole city quadrant to pieces if you let them explode that cruiser! Do you know how many people live here? Do you know the kind of cargo I have on that ship? It'll save lives! You can't, you can't!" Then, on a mad whim born of desperation, "What about all your soldiers? You'll all die too if you set off those bombs!"

Discontented mutterings rose from the armored men and women flanking them, but Wes only shook his head. "It was a bluff," he murmured. "Just in case. He won't take off. Not without you. It's over."

Soul- listening on the radio, no doubt, waiting faithfully, keeping the engines alight and ready, waiting for _her _to come up with a last-minute plan and save the day- fresh tears burned her stinging eyes. Soul was _listening, _she knew he was, so she said brokenly, "He will take off, though. He knows some things are more important. Some things have to run their course to the end."

She said the words, but inside she was only endless screaming, because in truth she had no idea how to get out of this mess. The cruisers were leaving, but now the ship would blow up an unimaginable area of packed city if they took off-

Then she looked up and saw gleaming yellow eyespots in one of the alleys snaking away from the docks, and shimmering, crystalline alien skin; the Kuipers and the Glieseans had come to investigate, it seemed.

Maka had never had an ear for music, in fact she didn't speak a word of Kuiper, but she'd grown up with two aliens who sang like they breathed, and when she screamed, "Help me! Please!" it was in the grumbling, shattered clamor of the Gliesean language, just as the brothers had taught her.

A beat passed, one precious, precious second, and then the Kuiper came barreling out of the shadows, eyespots glowing orange as it leapt for Wes' throat.

She wrenched free of his grip as he fell, and then she bolted for the two linked ships, zigzagging away from the soldier's blasts and skirting dangerously close to the flames at the bottom of her own, feeling the heat scorch her numbed face. She _knew _the megacruiser, she'd studied the damn blueprints for the thing over and over after stealing them herself not a month ago, and all she needed to do was climb up the side, reach the main entrance door, and find the lever just beside it, the emergency disconnect system that would free her ship and her family.

There were screams from the ground as she clambered up the megacruiser's ladder, handcuffed hands awkwardly in front of her, and she felt the Kuiper's bloodthirsty bellows in her chest as she went. Peering down, she saw the heavy Gliesean had finally managed to work its way out of the alley too, and it was quite mercilessly rolling over and over the screaming soldiers, a runaway juggernaut with impermeable mineralized skin.

There was someone near the base of the ladder, though, and she realized with a sinking feeling that she was still unarmed- but it was the dark-haired, slim soldier, and he glanced up at her. "I've got your back," he shouted, seemingly unaffected by the vicious flames not fifteen feet from him.

She was speechless, but there was no time to talk anyway, so she kept climbing, trying to count the seconds, frantic and panting. Shouts rang out below as soldiers finally reached the ladder, and blaster shots, but she had no _time; _heart pounding, she scrambled aboard the thin metal catwalk that linked the two ships, useless in this case but a standard part of the connecting system. And yes, there it was, the button; she stumbled over, lifted the plastic cover, and smacked her cuffed hands against it with a metallic jingle. The blue ties detached and began to whirr softly back into the ship, drawn in by gears deep inside, and she collapsed with a sigh onto the metal, warmed by the flames below.

Her radio was missing, lost in the scramble, but Soul would know what to do. He'd find a way to rescue her. Indeed, the new ship was already shaking, an inch away from liftoff. She got wearily to her feet again as the catwalk she was on rattled and began to automatically retract into the megacruiser, shuffling to the door; she knew all the codes, and one of another of them would open it before she fell.

"I did it," she whispered to no one, muscles jumping still from the stunner shot, chest aching from the force of her heartbeat, lungs burning. The first code didn't work, but the second did, and she'd lifted her foot to step inside the ship when the door abruptly slid closed again. "What?" Next to her, her ship sputtered more flames as Soul gunned the engine, and it shuddered violently into the slightest of upward motions.

The catwalk was still retracting, she'd be standing on thin air when it was done, and the code failed to work a second time. She looked down, clinging to the door, taking desperate steps backward to maintain her footing on the moving metal, and there beside the flames was Wes, snarling and screaming over the still form of the dark-haired man, but too far away to hear.

She knew, of course, that megacruisers also usually had a few forms of remote control, one of which involved total lockdown of all exterior doors. She'd just forgotten. But the city all around was safe, now. The bombs would not go off.

The catwalk finished retracting with a soft thump, just as the Fletcher ship finally attained liftoff, an impossibly huge ark sliding up past her towards the starlit sky and leaving dancing flames behind.

Maka clawed and clung to the warm side of the megacruiser for just a desperate moment, watching her last ship take off, bearing all her hopes and love, and then her fingertips slipped on the smooth door and she fell down into the fire.

* * *

><p><span>Epilogue<span>

August 5, 2497, The Daily Sun: 'Fletcher Rebellion Spreading Like Virus. Council Declares Bounty on the _Bullseye II'_

August 31, 2497, Venusian Times: 'Imperium Fleet En-route to Junction City Ambushed, Suffers Unprecedented Losses'

September 23, 2497, The Daily Sun: 'The Fletcher With White Hair: Who is He, and Why Does He Fight?'

November 19, 2497, Orcus Weekly: 'Gliesean Ambassador Gains Ground for Alien Rights, Protects Home Planet with Majority Vote. Council Has No Comment.'

December 29, 2497, The Tethys Insider: 'New Colonial Terraforming Regulations Pass With Flying Colors; Council Expresses Disappointment'

February 14, 2498, Junction City Scoop: 'Two New Planets Opened to Colonists Under New 'Forming Regulations; Twelve Ships Offer Free Passage to Colonists in Need'

April 28, 2498, Mars Daily: 'Junction City Opens 'Albarn Public Terraforming Academy', Funded by Anonymous Donation'

September 3, 2498, The Daily Sun: 'White Haired Fletcher Seen Again; His Imperium Bounty Raised, to Public Protests'

January 30, 2499, Venusian Times: 'Colonial Protests Heat Up. Imperium Under Scrutiny for Human Rights Violations'

March 2, 2499, Orcus Weekly: 'Blonde Fletcher Sisters Continue Reign of Terror'

April 2, 2499, Mars Daily: 'REVOLUTION ON FIRE ACROSS SOLAR SYSTEM!'

* * *

><p><strong>Author says:<strong> OH MAN okay, so! Whew. That's done. The theme was 'rise from the ashes' and, well, i think the very ending illustrates that ;) Resbang this year has been such an intense and awesome experience, and I want to thank the mods first of all, for their incredible hard work in putting this fandom even together. I also want to thank my wonderful wonderful betas for this story, Marsh of Sleep and therewithasmile, for all the help they gave me :) Love you guys!

To my readers, I hope you enjoyed this weird sad scifi thing. Let me know your thoughts, please, good or bad- I very much value the learning opportunity in concrit and also I'm a review-hungry whore, haha ;)

ALSO, i'm so stinking sorry about having to repost this like 5 times, I know it probably flooded the email boxes of my ffnet followers- SORRY. I still have no idea what happened.

OH! And go check out the art for this story! It's going to be linked to on my main profile here, on , shortly, as soon as my artists post their art. :) by nomyriad and amberlehcar on tumblr.


End file.
